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.