A big tip for beginners...

May 14th, 2008 by Admin

The dangers of tutorials

While the tutorial is the most valuable weapon in the arsenal of any self taught developer. There is an inherit danger that comes with tutorials that many do not realize. Enter the "Copy / Paste" monster. Now you can kid yourself but lets admit it... We've all done it. That doesn't mean your a naughty monkey that needs a macaroni spanking. I have though recently realized the true danger of letting this convenience become habit...

I'm sure you are all familiar with the excellent plugin Restful Authentication. Now as a beginner this can be a very confusing plug in and can be very intimidating. While the Readme explains most everything pretty well it still seems to give quite a few people problems. Because of this there have been several tutorials written involving this plug in and different things you can do with it. This is a great thing and I along with many other take my hats off to you. I have "followed" many of these tutorials... or so I thought. I realized that follow and copy are two different things. Many of these tutorials are very long and as a father of three young kids I can find it difficult to follow along thoroughly. This is when the copy / paste process begins.

What's wrong with a little simplicity? Well the first and most obvious thing is that you don't actually learn to use the plugin effectively. That's your choice really. The other problem which may not be so obvious, is that you may inadvertently put your user's security at risk. Just in case someone doesn't know, that's an excellent way to make your killer web app a ghost town with the quickness.

In summation, just be careful. Doesn't matter if you're old or new. If you're following a tutorial don't skim, don't follow. The best way to approach it is to make sure you have ample time to read it completely and reread the parts you're not so sure of. Another good tip is to keep a piece of paper handy and write down any questions you may have for the author. Once you have your questions then it's a good time to hit the comments. Read them just as thoroughly as there is usually very good information held within them as well as possible answers to your questions. Also don't be afraid to take notes for your self. Lastly many articles offer access to a printer friendly version of articles, posts, tutorials or what have you. So print that sucker out. and annotate your copy.

I do sincerely hope that this reaches some people and that they find it useful. Also to all of you out there taking the time to write tutorials. Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. If it takes me and hour to read I can only imagine how long it takes you to write and I for one am very appreciative.

Tagged:

tutorials, tips, rails, ruby, security, beginners

Posted in Ruby, Rails, General, Tutorials | 8 Comments

Brought it back...

May 12th, 2008 by Admin

I brought back my install of RBlog I'll be using this and slowly working on some major changes. I'll keep ya'll posted.

Tagged:

rblog, rails, ruby

Posted in Ruby, Rails, General | 0 Comments

Goodbye Alberta Blankenship Campbell

March 20th, 2008 by Admin

Tuesday I went to the funeral of my grandma "Birdie" Grandma was 81 years old and simply an incredible woman. She lived by herself and took car of herself. She was full of life and love and spent the majority of her days with a smile upon her face.

One of my fondest memories of my grandmother is the way she sung. She loved to sing little songs and would sing the names of roads as we drove a long. It sounds like something small but to me it will always be with me.

I'm not a man of many words. So I'll leave this post with that and to say Goodbye Grandma, I love you and I'll always miss you

Tagged:

personal

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Easy tip to keep your code tidy...

March 9th, 2008 by Admin

I have noticed that quite a few tutorials that involve validations use a similar format ie;

validates_presence_of :name
validates_presence_of :email
validates_presence_of :url

While this works it is an awful lot of typing when you can just as easily do

validates_presence_of :name, :email, :url

While this may be common knowledge it may be helpful to someone. Also validations aren't the only place where this works so try it out in your rails app and see how much space and time you can save.

Tagged:

rails, ruby, dry, clean code

Posted in Ruby, Rails, General, Tutorials | 1 Comment

Ryan Bates.... How can we give back

March 7th, 2008 by Admin

I was browsing around Rails Forum today and noticed that Ryan has made over 6300 posts. Now that's pretty incredible alone but there is also Railscasts with almost 100 completely free RoR screencasts. Now me personally I think that Ryan deserves a little appreciation. I'm gonna go over and donate a little cash to Ryan and encourage everyone else to do so.

Now while it would be great to donate some cash to Ryan and I'm sure he would appreciated it. I would like to see the community as a whole come together and do something nice for Ryan. Now I was thinking about setting up a special paypal account to take donations for a new MacBook for him but I don't think the general population would trust me which is wise on their part (not because I'm not trust worthy but this is the internet). That and this site doesn't get enough visitors in a year to raise that kind of money. So I'm hoping this post will get around to some of those people who do have more successful sites and can maybe think of a way to give this single man who has helped so many a little token of appreciation. I may be typing all of this in vain but I like to think that the community can come together to show him how much he's helped us.

Also Ryan if you happen to read this I want to personally thank you for all I've learned from your screencasts and forum posts. Many of them lead to me being able to write this blog application and become my first successful application. And I invite you to email me at altbs4 at yahoo dot com because I've talked to the author of the Askeet tutorial for the symfony php framework and received his permission to port it to RoR and I think if interested it could make for some great screencasts. Either way though thank you Ryan.

Tagged:

Ryan Bates, rails, ruby on rails

Posted in Rails, General | 1 Comment

NIR :: Northern Indiana Rubyists...

March 5th, 2008 by Admin

Well I was hoping to find a local Ruby users group but the closest I could find meets about two hours away. Now while I would love to meet with them by the time I got home after a meeting I would have about two hours to sleep before I have to get up and go do some manual labor. Therefore I have been toying with the idea of starting my own Ruby group for people that don't have one and are reasonably close to me. So what I'm hoping for here is to get some feedback on people who may be interested. I'm located in Ligonier, IN and the majority of the meetings would be close to Ligonier and mainly on the weekends. If you live near me and love ruby and rails please respond to this post and let me know what you think. Also thanks to Brent Collier from Acts-As-Blogr for suggesting that I start a local group.

Tagged:

ruby, rails, ruby group, indiana, norther indiana

Posted in Ruby, Rails, General | 5 Comments

Learning Ruby

March 3rd, 2008 by Admin

Well because of a small problem with my internet connection over the weekend I just today started in the 4th iteration of the free ruby course from Ruby Learning. I must say that so far I'm really enjoying the reading material and following along with the examples. I feel bad because I won't be able to follow along as fast as some of the others in the course but I'll do my best. I'll keep you posted on my progress and I really hope to see the fruits of my learning reflected in my rails applications.

Tagged:

ruby, learning

Posted in Ruby, General | 1 Comment

What's Next

February 14th, 2008 by Admin

Now that I have the base of my blog written and working I am now thinking of what I want to do next. I think there is still a lot of functionality left to add. I want to add something for registered users, I also want to change up how categories work. I also think I'll add a "page" system so that I can add static content pages. I do believe that I want to change the way archiving and the index pagination works.

Tagged:


Posted in Rails, General | 7 Comments

atom_feed_helper to the rescue!

February 12th, 2008 by Admin

Well my feeds are now working thanks to the awesome atom_feed_helper plugin. I suggest this plugin to anyone who needs to add feed functionality to there app. It took me about 5 minutes from install to publish to have everything all up and running.

Tagged:

feed, atom, atom_feed_helper

Posted in Ruby, Rails, General | 1 Comment

RSS Not Working.

February 11th, 2008 by Admin

Well it seems that for some reason my RSS feed isn't working all of the sudden. I will be working on this and I'll let you know once I have it all fixed up.

Tagged:

rss, feed, rss feed

Posted in Ruby, Rails, General | 1 Comment