The UJS Rails Plugin promises a very DRY way to add all sorts of AJAXy JavaScript to your rails application with pretty elegant code (my word, did I just write that bunch of jargon with a straight face?). Unfortunately, I'm not far enough along in my Rails work to make good use of it yet. Maybe later...

Processing Credit Cards with Ruby on Rails might come in handy for some of the future Rails sites I'm thinking about. (via Ruby Inside)

RuseWiki is a Rails-based wiki with strong antispam features. Apparently not released yet but available via SVN. Not that I need a wiki for anything at the moment, but you never know.

Sometimes I miss the obvious - though I linked to Komodo IDE a few days ago, I completely missed ActiveState's free Komodo Edit , a lighter-weight version of their product without the additional debugging, team, and other features (comparison between the two tools is here). Looks like this may answer the question I had a while ago about finding a decent CSS editor for my Linux environment. Though I'm more than happy with CSSEdit on the Mac side of the house, I'll definitely be taking a look at this one for its cross-platform (Mac/Linux/Windows) goodness.

I added the DynamicCalendarHelper plugin to my current Rails project today, only to discover that I couldn't call it the way that I expected from a view. Eventually I found the answer at Typo Sidebar - CalendarHelper which had instructions for turning the plugin into a global view helper. I was expecting a somewhat more seamless experience.

So either

• This doesn't work as intuitively as much of the rest of what I've seen in Rails


• This particular plugin could use some work


• I don't understand what's going on here

My money is on the third alternative at the moment.

One of these days I need to find time to dig into the Prototype javascript library. What's New in Prototype 1.5?" covers the new version that just came out. (via dzone)

James Higgs is the latest developer I've seen to publicly express a dissatisfaction with working in the Microsoft ecosystem. In his blog entry A change in my digital life he links back to this blog as well, which makes me either an inspiration or a bad influence (or perhaps a little of both).

I'm starting to think it's time for a support group, or at least a mailing list.

The new version 4.0 of Komodo is out. It's got all sorts of spiffy features for dynamic languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, TCL) as well as Rails support. But you know, right now I'm just not feeling the need for a $245 IDE for Rails development. Of course that may be just because I'm only doing little baby applications so far, but at the moment lightweight tools (like TextMate) are doing fine for me.

Mosquito is a Mac application that can be scripted to go through a Web site, supplying input as necessary, and saving screenshots as it goes along. The author suggests using it as a tool for checking that CSS changes do not screw up your site rendering, without having the bother of manually going through every page. (via dzone

RubyFurnace is an online repository for Gems and Rails plugins. There are quite a few there already to browse through. I'm guessing more tools for finding the best and most applicable to your own projects are still to come. (via dzone

Softies on Rails (the home for Microsoft refugees pursuing Rails, mostly on Windows), provides a list of Rails links . There's some good stuff in there, and many of them promptly went into my RSS reader.

Of course, if I keep adding new career related links to my existing old career related links, my RSS reader may well explode...

Learn Cocoa is a baby steps tutorial to building a simple Cocoa app (well, really, just sticking some components together, but it introduces the toolset). I'll probably work through it, though at the moment I don't have any particular ideas about Mac desktop apps that I'd want to build.

Found this one via Mike Clark's article on Piston. Subtlety takes the URL of a public Subversion repository and creates an RSS feed of changes for you, so you can monitor what's going on with that project. A sweet way to have one less place on the net that you have to visit, and one more piece of information in your own hands whenever you want it.

There are a couple of ways to get help for Rails online, but sometimes you just want to have it at your fingertips. Looks like Delynn Berry has you covered: hop over and download the Rails CHM Documentation , freshly updated for 1.2.1.

It's nice to see this Mephisto Theme Gallery (via HappyCodr)

Ruby 1.8.5 released!

I don't know which is more annoying - languages that only rev once every few years, or onces that are in a constant state of ferment so you never quite know where the line is between "beta," "working," and "deprecated."

Mike Clark has a good writeup at Managing Plugins with Piston . So far I'm liking what little I've done with Piston myself. Indeed, I may even find some use for it in my Windows corporate life.

Paul Ingles' Relative Dates with Scribbish in Mephisto proved to be just the tweak I needed for now. Thanks!

IdeaShuffle is my first Rails application (well, the first one that you can get to from the public Internet, anyhow). It's a tiny product brainstorming helper. It doesn't do a whole lot, but on the other hand, there's not a whole lot of code there, and I've only been poking at Rails for a short while.

I'll probably be back to refine it and add more features in a while (got any ideas? Leave me a comment) but for the moment I'm off to the next idea, so it's time to toss this one out there in its current state.

Lightning Admin for Postgresql and MySQL gives you a tabbed workspace for two of the major open source databases. Looks interesting, and $19.99 is a reasonable price, but I'm trying not to install any more Windows-only applications these days.