Category Archives: Rails

Swap your Rails stack traces for a REPL

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Lee Mallabone

The Developer tools I really love are those that help me reduce the time that elapses between a bug occurring and a bug being fixed. One of the more obvious types of bug is a top-level unhandled exception. The message “I’m … Continue reading →

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Get productive: hacking Sublime Text 2 for faster rails/project navigation

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Lee Mallabone

Programmer productivity stems from the ability to easily and efficiently navigate, create and edit the code you need to work with. To this end, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to the efficiency of your own daily workflow. If you’re … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails, Tools | 4 Comments

How to make Chrome understand the Sass/SCSS in your rails app

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Lee Mallabone

When you open the Chrome web inspector, you can browse to the styles that are being applied to your elements. It’s great. Unfortunately, if you’re using a framework like LESS or Sass, then by default Chrome will reference the CSS … Continue reading →

Posted in Chrome, CSS, Rails, Tools | 43 Comments

Using facebook connect (only) to authorize users with authlogic

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Lee Mallabone

I’ve been working on our semi-stealthy new webapp for the last couple of months and I’ve been putting off fixing a bug for ages because it was so damned weird. We want users to be able to sign-up with facebook … Continue reading →

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mig_constraints is not compatible with rails 2.3

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

Although it’s old, mig_constraints has sat in my rails plugin directory for a while now because it adds much needed foreign key support to ActiveRecord. I’m on of those crazy guys that thinks a relational database should maintain relational integrity, … Continue reading →

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Setting up a kick-ass rails server on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

I recently created a new slicehost and thought I’d try the latest Ubuntu release with it. Unlike brightbox hosting, you only get a plain boring ubuntu installation out of the box on slicehost (and various other VPS-based hosting services). A … Continue reading →

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Nokogiri fails to work on Solaris (11), but fix it like this!

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

I’ll have a better fix up in the near future, but for now, the ruby gem “Nokogiri” crashed out on me on Joyent’s Solaris platform. Its error was a little cryptic unless you’re familiar with libc. I can’t reproduce it here … Continue reading →

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Getting Rails 2.2 to work on Mac OS X, despite the MySQL ruby “gem”

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

rubygems makes package management a nightmare. This is demonstrated every time you try and setup a new server using your operating system’s ruby/rails packages. It gets fully demonstrated when you try and upgrade to Rails 2.2 on a Mac. You can … Continue reading →

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Explained: learning Ruby on Rails (Part 2)

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Lee Mallabone

If you followed along in , you will have downloaded and installed Netbeans 6 to get a complete Ruby development environment. You should also have prototyped a web design idea, added some dynamic code to it, and got cosy with … Continue reading →

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Explained: how the hell do I *really* learn Ruby on Rails?

Posted on October 27, 2008 by Lee Mallabone

I own several books on Rails, all of them very well written and pleasant to read. But there’s a big difference between reading a book and knowing & learning a platform. You have to code in that platform, you have … Continue reading →

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