I was playing around with Digg this morning and noticed Digg Spy. At first I thought it was really cool and wondered how they did that. Then I realized it’s just a bit of Ajax and, as anyone who’s read Pragmatic Ajax knows, Ajax is easy! So read on for how I implemented an Ajax spy in Rails and to download the code.
Apr 12
Chad Fowler has graciously accepted one of my recipes for inclusion in his new book, Rails Recipes! It’s recipe #65, “Easy HTML Whitelists�, in the latest beta version of the book. If you haven’t already pre-ordered your copy, I suggest you click over to the Pragmatic Programmers website and do so now. The other 69 recipes are just as good (if not better).
Apr 08
You know that really cool screencast at the Ruby on Rails website where Rails is used to create a Flickr interface in 5 minutes? Well, I followed the screencast and built my own copy and then I enhanced it with some additional JavaScript (Lightbox style preview of the images and a blind-up on subsequent searches). Note that in the course of making my changes I found out the proper ordering of the JavaScript callbacks (see this) – even though you would think that :before would be called prior to a :complete, it doesn’t always happen that way (so sometimes the new results are blinded-up and not shown).
I’ve been meaning to upload this for awhile, but just haven’t gotten around to it. So today I updated it to work with Rails 1.1.1 (though didn’t switch the Ajax-y goodness over to RJS). Hopefully other folks can benefit from the code. To run it all you have to do is first install the flickr ruby gem, like so:
sudo gem install flickrand unzip and run this Rails app. Enjoy!
Apr 01
I’m curious why I can’t find anyone experimenting with the use of superconductors (high temperature superconducting (HTS) wire, specifically) in networking applications. I realize that fiber is really cheap now and HTS wiring is not. But it would be nice to see the transmission distances, for example, for an HTS version of Cat 6 with RJ-45 style connectors.
