If I Were Creating Rails.app

Nothing but respect for Yehuda, but I'm thinking the Kickstarter model for creating a tool might not fit terribly well in the OSS landscape. I could be wrong. Either way - I have an idea.

Understanding the Rails Asset Pipeline

Rails 3.1 marks a strange turning point in the evolution of Rails: many hard-core fans are feeling the framework is losing its edge and becoming over-engineered. That might be a premature opinion.

Sign Up For Railscasts Pro, Get a Free Tekpub Production

If you've ever done anything with Rails, you've ended up at Railscasts.com at some point. Ryan Bates is one of those pivotal people that have made a dramatic difference in so many people's lives - mine included - and it's time he was rewarded.

Building Your Rails Box on OS X For Softies

It can be pretty jarring to get your shiny new Mac ready to go with the best that *nix/Ruby/Rails has to offer, especially if you don't have the right information. I'll share what I've done for the last 6 Macs I've bought.

How To Backup Your Postgres DB To Amazon Nightly

We just recently pushed Tekpub over to Posgres and all in all, it was very simple. I won't talk about the reasons we moved from MySQL - that's another post. This one is all about making sure your backups go off nightly.

Empty Charsets in IE 9 Causing JSON Parsing Errors

My last post was a bit of a pulpy, prosey trope about a problem I had debugging an issue in IE 9. It was supposed to be a fun read - but it turns out I might have actually uncovered an issue with IE 9... so giving the team due respect, here's a bit more detail.

A Testable PayPal IPN with Rails 2.3

I’ve been building out an IPN (PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification) responder using Rails 2.3.5 recently and managed to get it to work with Mongo, Cucumber, and Pickle without mocking and by testing pure form posts to the IPN in an automated way using RSPec’s post method. That’s a mouthful – but here’s what I have.