Man, I hate site teething pains.

•  acts_as_soft_deletable - New alternative to acts_as_paranoid.


• Reactive - Ruby MVC framework for desktop applications.


• Paperclip Tips and Updates - News about this file attachment handler for Rails, now with S3 baked in.


• Palmist - Tool for finding and fixing MySQL bottlenecks in Rails applications.

A pretty quiet day in my corner of the Rails universe.

Deploying with Capistrano via a gateway - Chu Yeow sorts a few things out. I have one project where this would be useful, except that they are stuck on an older Capistrano due to inertia.

Looks like another back burner project is heating up again. The rest of the week may be pretty busy.

• Load Balancing & QOS with HAProxy - More fancy Rails serving. If I ever hire again, I'm going to be looking for a sysadmin/ops guy (or gal!) first.


• FiveRuns Manage 2.0 - Now in Public Beta - Another solution for monitoring the entire Rails stack.


• Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server Using Passenger, Part 2 - More setup fu.

Had a nice spike of learning about in-place editing yesterday. I'm not yet convinced this is a good UI.

• JSSpec - BDD for Javascript.


• Adventures in Javascript Testing - Slides from Thomas Fuchs.


• editable_content_tag: The in_place_editor for Rails 2.0 - With tweaks to play nice with RESTful resources.


• Ruby On Rails Domains for Sale - railssolutions.com and rubyonrailssolutions.com are on the market.

Finally got the multi-file upload feature I've been wrassling with working. Hopefully this means I can move on to something else soon.

• Widgetfinger - CMS that is designed to automate as much as possible of very small sites.


• LiveHTTPHeaders - Header-monitoring add-in for Firefox. I honestly like ieHTTPHeaders better from a UI point of view - but not enough better to use IE.


• Living on the Edge (of Rails) #20 - Things are moving slowly in edge Rails at the moment.


• Huba Huba - Tidbits for advanced GitHub use. Man, I just can't keep up with the kids these days.


• Rails 2.1 RC1 - Beans spilled via Twitter.


• Prototype 1.6 PDF - Printable documentation for this javascript library.


• Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 Code Complete - I've been using the nightly builds. They've stabilized vastly in the last couple of weeks.


• Merbunity - Community site for merb news and tutorials.


• TextMate Bundles for Merb - News from Dr. Nic.

And now I'm mired in Javascript. Lucky me.

• Introducing Resourceful Views 0.1 - A set of helpers and conventions to make writing forms using resources even less verbose.

This multi upload UI is slowly coming together. Though if it were me, I'd talk the client out of wanting to see progress meters in a Rails app.

• Mongrel Upload Progess Plugin - One of the better-looking solution for upload progress callbacks. The problem is that it locks you into Mongrel.


• Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server Using Passenger - A setup guide, with part 2 to come.


• In-place file upload with Ruby on Rails - The GMail technique for asynchronous uploads.

A very busy day looms. But first, a few links.

• Multiple file uploads with Ruby on Rails and file_column - One of the more useful things I've found on the issues, though it doesn't quite match the current requirements.


• Responds to Parent - This may be another bit required to get multi-file uploads working: a way to send AJAX responses back from an IFRAME to its parent.


• El Dorado 0.9.2 - Another generalized bit of community software written in Rails.

Next I need to dig into multiple file uploads for a Rails app. This may or may not be fun.

• HoboFields - Rails migration generator that lets you annotate models instead of writing your own migratios. (via Ruby Inside)


• Announcing: Feather - Merb-based blogging software.


• Introducing the uses_connection plugin: Intended to let multiple Rails apps use the same database.


• Rails development for iPhone with rails-iui - Plugin to make some of the required styling and plumbing simpler.

Working with a poorly-configured server all weekend. Hope to do something more fun today.

• Capistrano 2.3.0 - More incentive to switch some of those old projects over to the 2.x series. Maybe I can get around to that next week.


• Rails Endless Page Plugin - Eliminate scrolling a la Google Reader. (via Pete Forde)


• Avoid Using Metaprogramming (Seriously!) - Or at least realize that clever code sometimes has a speed cost.


• Living on the Edge (of Rails) #19 - The latest changes. With 2.1 about to release, things are getting nailed down, it looks like.

Looks like work hours are going to heat up next week. Meanwhile I need to find time to put together the giant play structure for the kids. Hooray for flexible hours.

• Acts_as_quickbooks_model - Another Rails plugin that I might need soon.


• New Relic - These folks got a burst of press coverage yesterday for their Rails performance-monitoring solution, even though they're not shipping yet and there are others in the niche already out. The power of a good press release and good contacts wins again.

And a new month dawns...I might actually have some spare hours this month if anyone is looking for them.

• Exif jpeg header manipulation tool - This one came in handy for me last night when I had to nuke the metadata out of a bunch of photos.


• 37signals and the pain of the below-the-fold button - Yes, the web is not an excuse for bad UI. Well, it shouldn't be.


• Architecture Astonauts Take Over - Joel Spolsky makes some of the criticism of Live Mesh that I might have gone with if I'd bothered to waste any space on it.

Spending a good deal of time playing SQL monkey, recovering stuff out of a soon-to-be-legacy database. At least it's some variety.

• Git Internals PDF - The latest from PeepCode.


• Webistrano 1.3 - New release of this web-based tool for managing Capistrano deployments.


• Free Open Source Projects in Lighthouse - Just in case you needed a reason to track your project's bugs there.


• Creating More with Less Effort Using Ruby on Rails - A List Apart discovers Rails.

Bother. A pesky bug I thought I had swatted has resurfaced in another guise.

• Juggernaut - Push data plugin for Rails. Looks interesting, though I have no current use for it.

It was a productive weekend; I got a major feature shipped for one of the sites I work on. Now back to the regular workweek.

• Pitfalls in RESTful "wizards" - dealing with page-caching fun in Rails.


• Nightly Tester Tools 2.01 - I don't think I could live on edge Firefox without this. The ability to selectively recover tabs from the previous session is a winner.


• Stage 0.3.1 - Code generator for Rails and Merb using the presenter pattern.


• Prototip - Flexible tooltips for Prototype/Scriptaculous.


• Scripteka - Library of extensions for Prototype.


• Living on the edge (of Rails) #18 - It's been a quiet week.


• Making Compact Forms More Accessible - Easiest way I found to get hints in textareas that vanish when users start typing.


• The Apple "i" - Nice sendup of the prototypical Apple keynote.


• Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls - Probably more Ruby VM gossip than you really need.

And just like that I'm back to having plenty to do. The life of a consultant is never predictable for long.

• Keep Google Happy: SEO for Online Stores - What to do and how to check it.


• Migrate from Jira or Trac to Lighthouse - In case you want to move your issue tracking to the new popular home in the Rails world.


• CruiseControl.rb 1.3.0 - A release with a few improvements. Git support is planned for the next release.


• Hey Rails, Nice Rack! - Ezra  Zygmuntowicz is hacking on Rails to give it Rack support. This would be a big win for various deployment scenarios.

My initial reaction to Live Mesh is that it's just another attempt to co-opt the web with a proprietary Microsoft platform, no different conceptually than the original MSN/"Blackbird" (which failed, as you may or may not recall). Perhaps I'll change my mind later.

• TMTOOLS plugin - For those who want to do some low-level TextMate hacking.


• RubyAMP TextMate Bundle - Adds another grep implementation, better completion, hooks into tail and firing up servers, and other goodies for Rails & Merb developers.


• New in Rails: ActiveResource Timeouts and why it matters - Protect yourself from the vagaries of other peoples' servers.


• Today - Tiny event & task manager that synchronizes with iCal.


• What's up in Ruby? - Dedicated search engine based on Ruby community RSS feeds.


• Software as a Service Rails Kit - New bootstrapper that gets you up and running quickly with ActiveMerchant, SSL, multiple levels of accounts - all the stuff under your typical Web 2.0 app. $249 base price.


• Better messages for ActiveRecord validation errors - A tiny bit of fit and finish work for your Rails app.

The latest nightly of Firefox 3 is working much better for me than Beta 5 - at the cost of losing Firebug. That's a mixed blessing at best.

• Rapid Rails Part 3 - Desktop Mastery - A medley of useful tips.


• Slapp: A simple wall chat Merb tutorial - Get up and running with the Merb framework. (via Ruby Inside)


• Active Shipping: Plugin that gives a unified API for retrieving ship costs.

I spent a bit of time playing with Google App Engine over the weekend. One thing that hasn't been widely reported is that it's trivial to set up a folder to serve files statically. This means, I think, that App Engine might make a good asset host for Rails apps looking for distributed storage.

• First class vendor/gems - A variant approach to storing the required gems with a Rails project.


• Hobo 0.7.5 Released - Better documentation and other goodies.


• CapGun - Email notifications for Capistrano deployments.


• Deferred requests with merb, ebb, and thin - Fine-tuning the deployment stack.


• Radiant CMS 0.6.5 "Chisel" Release - Lots of action in this Rails CMS project. Another thing I need to dig into someday.


• Symbols Are Not Pretty Strings - Josh Susser says we're all using too many symbols.


• Preview Releases: Net::SSH, Net::SSH::Multi - With news that a new Capistrano release is coming soon.


• ERb Syntax highlighting in gedit - I don't expect to be hacking Rails on Linux again soon, but if you do this could come in handy.


• ActsAsOptions - Plugin to simplify generating option lists for <select> tags.


• Living on the edge (of Rails) #17 - A fairly quiet week for Rails development.

Up early with an earthquake. Just like when I was a kid.

• May We Help You? - Amazon is getting more serious about support levels for AWS.


• QuickBooks Integration Plugin - For Rails. I have a project that will need this eventually.