Tabbed Interface – A new rails plugin

Aug 17th

Posted by jondruse in Rails

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It’s not like we really need a new rails plugin, but this one I really saw the need for. Tabbed interfaces can really improve how your website looks and flows. Here’s a great article from smashingmagazine about how, when and why to use tabbed interfaces. Here’s a quick rundown of the plugin. Let me know what you think!

TabbedInterface

Build a tabbed interface very easily. Requires Prototype.

see a working example at http://tab-interface.heroku.com Install

./script/plugin install git://github.com/jondruse/tabbed_interface.git

Move the ajax-loader.gif from the resources folder to your public images folder, or go make one at http://www.ajaxload.info/. Whatever you do, just make sure you call it ajax-loader.gif.

An example More >

Pesky form error markup in Rails

Jun 25th

Posted by jondruse in Rails

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Have you ever spent hours coding up the most awesome form you’ve ever seen only to have Rails break it with it’s error markup? I have, and it really sucks. So today I set out on a mission to solve this ever annoying problem. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1. Find the source.

If you’ve ever gone looking through Rails source, you know this wasn’t a very easy thing to do. But after some digging I found what was causing me so much grief.

# active_record_helper.rb in action_pack/action_view/helpers @@field_error_proc = Proc.new{ |html_tag, instance| "<div class=\"fieldWithErrors\">#{html_tag}</div>" }

Step 2. Figure out what you want.

I found that the problem More >

Leveraging the power of inheritance in Rails.

Jun 22nd

Posted by jondruse in Rails

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Here’s a neat trick.  It’s pretty simple but really helpful.

Problem: You’re always setting up the same stuff in every controller. Layouts, helper methods and so on.

Solution: Set up your own controller to inherit from.

Throw this into a new file in the controllers folder called base_controller.rb.

class BaseController < ApplicationController     layout "base"   helper :my_cool_helper   end

Now take any controller and change the first line like below. Now anything in BaseController you get for free. So in the example below, PostsController’s layout will be “base” and will have the MyCoolHelper included also.

class PostsController < BaseController   def list   end end

Wow, that was easy. Now it’s More >

Git Documentation for Apple Dictionary

Jun 1st

Posted by jondruse in Git

3 comments

A couple months ago I found Priit Haamer’s blog post about the Ruby Dictionary for Mac OS X. So now I’ve ported the Git Documentation to Dictionary.app also. Please let me know of any bugs.  Enjoy!

Download
  1. Download gitdictionary file (<1MB, works only with 10.5 Leopard) and proceed to installation instructions.
Installation
  1. Unzip downloaded file into ~/Library/Dictionaries folder if you want to keep this dictionary only for yourself. You may need to create this folder if you haven’t installed any dictionaries before.
  2. To make the searching with Spotlight work, open Dictionary.app preferences pane and drag “Git” from the dictionaries list from bottom to the top because only the More >