13 posts
Recently Rails 2.3 was released, with a number of new features.
One of these was the ability to set the created_at/updated_at time-stamped columns manually. Now, why anybody would want to do this currently escapes me – but that aside, those columns are now attr_accessible.
This means that anybody can set them by manually editing the forms on your site, so you can’t trust them to be correct. Your audit trail is no longer valid.
You probably saw the Skittles debacle a while back. They basically turned their entire home page into a Twitter search for the word ‘skittles’.
What was quite an innovative idea opened Skittles up to quite some exploitation, people posted literally anything to get on their homepage, regardless of how gratuitous.
Whether you’re building a new website, or want to manage your community more effectively – moderation is a common requirement.
Unfortunately computers haven’t got to the stage where they can recognize libelous/offensive images – so UGC often has to get passed in front of a human moderator to get an accurate verdict.
Well, the uprising against IE 6 has begun, and not a moment too soon – IE 6 will be seven years old on August 27th. In fact, there’s even a service to say goodbye to the old dinosaur.
You can do your bit for the Internet by showing a warning to IE 6 users in your Rails applications, or disabling it completely for those users, encouraging them to upgrade their browsers (or nag the relevant Sys Admin).
Firstly you need to install the UserAgent plugin by Josh Peek:
script/plugin install git://github.com/josh/useragent.git
Whenever companies want to publish user generated content (UGC) they need to look into moderation, which usually consists of either pre-moderation, post-moderation or reactive moderation.
I’ve been working on an open source SaaS solution for Rails over Christmas called Saasy (pronouced “sarrsy” – using a posh voice).
Saasy provides:
Fonts can be a developer’s nightmare if they’re not one of the ones installed on the user’s machine. There are alternatives such as sIFR and typeface.js but they’re quite resource intensive – we had to remove sIFR for that reason.
On Saturday I did a presentation at Ruby Manor on using recommendation systems in production featuring our plugin, acts as recommendable (AAR).
We’ve been using our new Acts As Recommendable plugin on metrotwin.com and it’s been interesting to see how it’s performing in a real-world situation.
Bookmarks (places) are integral to Metrotwin, and a user can associate themselves with a bookmark by ‘Loving it’, saving it to their profile, or by stating they’ve been there.
Stuart and I were presenting at Rails Conf Europe last week in Berlin on a Rails plugin called Juggernaut which I’ve been working on for a few years now.
Juggernaut lets you do ‘Server Push‘, i.e. you can push data to the client from the server.
