synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

News

I try to keep up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, even if I’m not working with one of them at the moment. These are the three feeds helping me to get the latest news:

PlanetRubyOnRails.com, not to be mixed up with PlanetRubyOnRails.org, is a simple feed aggregator with a set of quite informative blogs. Including the official Riding Rails Blog, Ruby Inside, and InfoQ. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide an RSS-Feed anymore, but thanks to Feed43 it’s easy to build one on your own.

Every Wednesday Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of Rails Envy publish their Rails Envy Podcast, covering last week’s most important topics in the Ruby and Rails community. They’re giving a short summary for every topic, together with a link in their shownotes and usually are fooling around. The podcast’s length is usually between 10 to 15 minutes.

RubyOnRails-Ug Planet

Just like PlanetRubyOnRails, the planet of the german ruby on rails usergroup is a feed aggregator, except it includes blogs of members of the german Ruby on Rails community. (Yes, mine too …) Its far from being as active as the international one, but usually includes interesting posts.

Documentation

When I’m working on Ruby and Ruby on Rails code, I use there resources to quickly look up documentation:

Ruby-Doc.org provides the documentation for both Ruby’s Core and Stdlib. The documentation is in the default RDoc format, so I usually end up hitting [Strg]+[F] and using my browsers search function to quickly get to the relevant sections.

api.rubyonrails.com

What Ruby-Doc.org is for ruby, api.rubyonrails.com is for rails. It’s the standard rails documentation in the default RDoc format. As with Ruby-Doc.org I use my browsers search to quickly find what I’m looking for.

Rails-Doc.org is a quite new site providing the full rails documentation. Unlike the default API documentation site (see above) it also includes documentation of older rails versions. Additionally it has a nice search engine, and adds the ability to post notes. There are other sites providing similar functionality for the rails documentation, but somehow Rails-Doc.org just feels right and I’m using more and more.

Gem Server

Did you know the fabulous RubyGem-Tools provide a server including the documentation for all your installed gems? Simple run gem server on the console, fire up your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8808. Okay, it’s just the standard RDoc documentation for each gem, without any fancy search or anything … but who cares if you’re somewhere in the middle of nowhere with no internet connection? :-)

Other

Last but definitely not least, are the RailsCasts by Ryan Bates. Every Monday he publishes a approx. 5 to 10 minute screencast on a variety of topics related to rails development. If you haven’t seen one of them yet, don’t hesitate any longer. Ryan’s explanations are concise and based on practical examples.

What are your resources on Ruby / Rails? Which blogs are you reading to stay up-to-date? Which documentation are you using? I’m interested in your comments (there are way to few anyways … ;-))!

Update (Aug 15.)

Nodeta, creators of Rails-Doc.org, released APIdock yesterday. APIdock extends the Rails-Doc.org concept to multiple projects. Currently Rails, Ruby and RSpec are included.

Script.aculo.us includes a nice effect called Effect.DropOut, which let’s the element fall in an “invisible trap” underneath. Surprisingly there isn’t an opposite effect. Calling Effect.DropOut with Effect.Transitions.reverse as transition, doesn’t work either. So what to do? Effect.Emerge to the rescue!

   1  
   2  Effect.Emerge = function(element) {
   3    element = $(element);
   4    var oldStyle = {
   5      top: element.getStyle('top'),
   6      left: element.getStyle('left') };
   7    var position = element.positionedOffset();
   8    return new Effect.Parallel(
   9      [ new Effect.Move(element, {x: 0, y: -100, sync: true }), 
  10        new Effect.Opacity(element, { sync: true, from: 0.0, to: 1.0 }) ],
  11      Object.extend(
  12        { duration: 0.5,
  13          beforeSetup: function(effect) {
  14            effect.effects[0].element.show().makePositioned().setStyle( { top: (position.top + 100) + 'px' }); 
  15          },
  16          afterFinishInternal: function(effect) {
  17            effect.effects[0].element.undoPositioned().setStyle(oldStyle);
  18          } 
  19        }, arguments[1] || { }));
  20  };

Basically it’s just a modified version of Effect.DropOut to reverse the effect. Try it in compination with Effect.multiple ... :-)

... and messed it up.

Last week I’ve been giving a talk (in german) about the project I did during my internship at the Human Computer Interaction Research Center at the university of applied sciences Fulda. This was the first talk I gave (not counting those I had to do in school and for university) and of course it ended up a little awkward. I didn’t intend to do a live demo at the end but somehow I changed my mind during the presentation. Of course nothing worked like expected … ;-) Lessons learned for next time. If you’d like to see the disaster yourself there is a video available.

I got my thesis’ topic last week and will start to write it within the next few days. I decided to write it using TeX as all my attempts to write large documents in OpenOffice.org caused very bad headaches. The TeX approach fits my needs much better and I can use GIT much more effectively to manage the changes to the documents. With TeX I could even apply patches to the document … how cool is that? :-) Just imagine sending the document to someone else for proofreading and getting back a patch that can be instantly applied without having to search every passage that had misspelled words in it. Maybe I’ll post some links that helped me getting into all the TeX stuff in the near future.

During the last week I built a new design for both the blog and the website. The website isn’t finished yet but today I decided to update the blog’s design. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Additionally I updated the underlaying Mephisto Blog and added Sven Fuchs’ Paged Article Lists Plugin.