Ruby
Listing Social Networks in Ruby
I spent a little time tonight working on The Enclave's new member page. The site overall is the most beautiful thing in the world, but I have been using it as an excuse to plan more with Sinatra.
Tonight, I found the need to provide a way for our members to list their social networks should they choose to do so. The obvious way was to add a list of anchor tags. I found this to be rather distasteful. I mean, we are dealing with Ruby here, right? So, I started by considering what I wanted the UI code to look like. Would do I want to have to work with on a weekly basis. I came up with the following:
This would allow me to add as many usernames and networks as I desired. Perfect! So I began to work on the code that would make this function as intended. I came up with the following:
So, basically, I list all of the networks I want to use. This list not only includes the URL (and a place holder for the username), but any prefix or suffix for the displayed username for which I might find a need (i.e.: Twitter's "@" in "@slant") Next, the script iterates through my list, catching each network as it does so. Each time the script reaches a network, it proceeds through each username in the list, building an appropriate anchor tag for each one.
In the end, you have a beautiful categorized list of usernames, each linking to their respective page.
Journey to Snow Leopard
Like many, I was in my local Apple Store on August 28th to pick up their newest operating system update, Snow Leopard. Despite hearing about some compatibility issues, my inner-first-adopter got the better of me and since it was basically the beginning of a weekend, I began down the path of the upgrade.
Luckily, I walked out of the installation process unscathed for the most part with only a few minor issues to deal with. One example would be that Phusion Passenger was no longer working – but mongrel was – so that was livable. Realizing that I'd not yet setup a decent database for development since getting my new MacBook Pro, I set to work on basically reinstalling the entire Rails stack to ensure that everything would be ready to roll when I get back to work on Monday.
I found a few fantastic resources to guide me through the majority of what I was looking to do including Hivelogic's guide on Compiling Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard as well as another guide on Compiling Git on Snow Leopard. I also found some great information on installing PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard. Lastly, I discovered a very short guide on compiling the PostgreSQL RubyGem for use on Snow Leopard (enabling 64bit compatibility).
Equipped with these guides, I successfully got everything upgraded and am now waiting for all of the other 10.6 bugs to pop up!
edit: A definitive guide in deed. I just found a guide for those of you who want to install things like MySQL and SQLite as well.