rails:freeze:gems | freezzo.com

I have decided to take a stab at using squidoo effectively, while promoting a clickbank product to hopefully make some sales. I was over at potpiegirl.com and her posts really inspired me to try harder. I contacted her and asked her for some tips, which she gladly helped out with.

I pulled together a squidoo lens, which that in itself can be overwhelming, and came up with a page promoting creating free electricity. I am no expert, so I’m not even sure if what I’m doing will work. Hopefully it works out well!

On a side note, you can follow me on twitter

Couldn’t help it, but this made me laugh. Got the same response from co-workers I passed it around to:

I had an application that was prompting a HTTP Authentication box in IE after using the restful authentication plugin. The way I fixed it was to replace the access_denied method in lib/authenticated_system.rb to:

def access_denied
  respond_to do |format|
    format.any do
      #format.html do
      store_location
      redirect_to new_session_path
    end
    #format.any do
      #  request_http_basic_authentication 'Web Password'
    #end
  end
end

Noticed I commented some lines out. This was so that if i ever need to revert, the code will still be there and I wont have to go looking for it. Hope this helps!

If you weren’t already aware of this, there IS a difference between using route_url and route_path. Here are what they return:

<%= posts_url %>  # => http://localhost:3000/posts
<%= posts_path %> # => /posts

As a general rule of thumb, you would want to use posts_url in your controllers, and posts_path in your views.

While this isn’t a ruby on rails specific issue, I do tend to do this a lot, and never thought twice about it, until it starts bugging the crap out of me.
The issue is that you have a link that is used to do some type of javascript, instead of linking. So you add an onclick event, but you need something to link to. I usually put in a # sign:

<a href="#" onclick="dosomething();">Do Something</a>

<%= link_to 'Do Something', '#', :onclick=>'dosomething()' %>

This is great, except that it jumps you to the top of the page. Very annoying. Here is the solution:

<a href="#nogo" onclick="dosomething();">Do Something</a>

<%= link_to 'Do Something', '#nogo', :onclick=>'dosomething()' %>

Notice I added “nogo” to my #. This will help prevent from jumping to the top of the page. You can of course use any text you want there.

The guys over at NeverBlock have released a database adapter for Rails application that will severely increase the performance of ActiveRecord. Its also really easy to integrate into your application. Heres how:

Add a line to environment.rb for mongrel or thin servers:

require 'never_block/servers/thin'

or

require 'never_block/servers/mongrel'

Change the adapter in database.yml:

adapter: neverblock_postgresql

or

adapter: neverblock_mysql

You can also specify the number of connections (default of 4):

connections: 12

More information, along with benchmarks, can be found here.