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Conventional Rails 27 Jun 2013 | 10:15 am
Otherwise known as… This post could also be called “Stuff I’ve figured out about Rails but didn’t want to blog about because I suspect everyone else already knows it and will figure out that I’m a mo...
Adding Events to Various Calendars (Google, Live, Yahoo) 6 Mar 2013 | 10:07 am
Everything’s a nail In the past I’ve used a jquery plugin for generating links to add events to a calendar, but it recently broke when I upgraded jquery on TroopTrack. So I started banging around tryi...
Useful Way to Automagically Add Controller/Action Selectors to an App 4 Feb 2013 | 09:08 pm
Not Invented Here I swiped this idea from the work Craig Ulliott did on bodyshopbids.com. Thanks Craig! Don’t hard-code selectors for action and controller specific CSS and Javascript Sometimes you ne...
Getting Started with the AWS Elastic Transcoder API in Rails 31 Jan 2013 | 09:28 pm
Elastic What? Elastic Transcoder is a brand new product from Amazon that lets you transcode videos into your favorite formats. It comes with lots of awesome preset formats, so you can use it through t...
A Convention for Displaying Privileged Links 28 Jan 2013 | 08:09 pm
I really hate view code like this: - if can_manage_users = link_to 'Add a user', new_users_path I want to get rid of it for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason is for cacheing. It really compl...
Uploading Huge Files with Rails 28 Jan 2013 | 02:42 am
I’m working on an application that involves a lot of video content – great big files of 1 GB or more – and we found that uploading those huge files through a multipart form sucked. Duh. I started look...
When is ugly code okay? 24 Jan 2013 | 09:07 pm
Yesterday I retweeted @donnfelker, who said Ugly code that ships and solves a problem is a 100 times better than beautiful code that doesn’t ship One of my friends later told me that if he didn’t alre...
Two Helper Methods I Use Too Much 24 Jan 2013 | 02:22 am
Carets and Icons There’s nothing particularly brilliant about these, and they are probably only moderately useful. Mostly I’m putting them out there so that you can (preferably nicely) tell me how stu...
Taking the Suck Out of Active Admin Performance 20 Dec 2012 | 07:25 pm
Problem #1: A nagging memory problem TroopTrack memory gets out of control every couple of days. It bumps up to 95% of available memory and stays there, triggering notifications from New Relic and slo...
Creating a Calendar with Twitter Bootstrap WITHOUT TABLES 11 Dec 2012 | 02:31 am
I recently upgraded TroopTrack from Twitter Bootstrap 1 to 2, redesigning a few key aspects of the site to make it more usable. Overall, I was very pleased with the results except for one area – the c...
