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Rails 3 upgrade - A Retrospective

UPDATED: October 11th, 2010 Now with more working code!

August 29th, 2010 was a glorious day for Rails developers around the globe, not only because it is my birthday, but also because Rails 3.0 was officially released. I would like to send congratulations and thanks to all 1600 contributors that helped make this release a reality.

I’ve spent the better part of September upgrading our main application to Rails 3. My hopes are that you will read this and gain some insight as what to expect when upgrading your own application.

Installation, Configuration, Deployment: node.js Applications on Media Temple

I'm very excited about node.js. I'm sure if you're a javascript fan that you've heard about it too. I'll leave determining the usefulness of node to you. This article serves as a guide to installing, configuring, and deploying node.js on a media temple dedicated virtual server. Even without a Media Temple (dv) you should be able follow along on your own server. Read more...

Writing Tests First in FireUnit

A couple of weeks ago I made the decision to only write code that turns a unit test from failing to passing. This is also known as BDD (Behaviour Driven Development). This is a big step towards becoming the ninja programmer I want to be. I'll leave the philosophical discussion out of this post, and rather use the time we have together to share what I found to be a pretty good BDD solution for writing JavaScript. Read more...

Pimp your Twitter

We're poppin a digital collar. If normal twitter is a beat-up oldsmobile with food-stains on the driver's seat and a broken door-handle, our article will take you to a pristine cadillac with suede seats and a nice furry set of dice in the mirror. Read more...

How to Build An iPhone Web App - Part 1

I've been trying to figure out what the best way to share some of the ideas we've been coming up with over the last few months. Instead of doing a bunch of case studies, or trying to get permission from some of our higher profile clients, we've decided to do a short series on how to build an iPhone web application. Read more...

Combining CSS For Production Use

This article shows how we've been combining our cascading stylesheets for production usage. We use a combination of a rake script, a borrowed class from the folks over at Prototype.js and a little PHP. This lets us have multiple stylesheets files in development, but then combines them into a single one ready for deployment on the server. Read more...