a timocracy of one

So Alek has started blogging again. He’s the creator of the handy AdxMenu, a dropdown menu that uses simple semantic mark-up and css, and then whatever minimum amount of js is needed to make IE work, like Suckerfish, but can also add in his Windows Control Hider that makes it cover up select boxes in IE 6 and lower.

Oh, and if you are in a professional setting where blogs designed around supermodels might be inappropriate, he’s redesigned for a much cleaner simpler look… minus the Yasmeen. ;)

I need to get Steph to whip up a real logo or something, one of these days. I just wanted to swap out the InfoSauce logo, because even though I like it, this is my personal blog, so I busted out a copy of Inkscape and went wild.

Dynamic Scaffold Resource is now moved to Google Code. That has been the plan for a little while, but I had to get the repository reset, so I could svnsync the old repo up and keep the history.

Since this is a move to a project specific svn repository that has obviously been moved all around. And since the repository UIDs are different, you basically just need to do a clean checkout of trunk anyways:

http://dynamic-scaffold-resource.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

I looked into it a little more this morning, and came up with how to still get the submit button disabling, to avoid double-posts, without having to rework anything substantially.

<%= submit_tag 'Submit', :onclick => "$('commentform').onsubmit();this.disabled=true;Element.hide('preview');return false;"%>

You first call the form’s onsubmit, since IE won’t call it if you submit the form via JavaScript, then you prevent browsers that don’t cancel the form when you disable the submit button from double-submitting, by returning false at the end.

This should still work with javascript off, if you have the “Allow non-Ajax comments” setting turned on.

I added a couple instance variables that can optionally be set so that the test helper can actually be used in something beyond the skeleton of the plugin’s own test environment. You can use it in an authenticated environment now, because you can set @scaffold_session_params and you can use it on resources that have validation in their models, because it will use @scaffold_dummy_object for the create and edit test, if you set it.

Didn’t change the core of the plugin itself, but the testing piece really was useless, so I had to add this just to use it on the project I made the plugin for in the first place.

For those who may have noticed that your Typo blog won’t allow comments from IE users (is that a feature, or what?), I found the problem.

<%= submit_tag 'Submit', :onclick => "this.disabled=true; Element.hide('preview');" %>

The “this.disable=true” disables the submit button before the form is submitted, so all that happens is the onclick. For now I am just taking that out of mine – I’ll look at a better fix later.

I got everything I wanted done: testing, easy install, and documentation, so as of now Dynamic Scaffold Resource is ready to go. I’m holding off on making it officially 1.0 to see if there is any feedback from the people who expressed interest on the Rails core list.

While I know it could be fleshed out a lot more, my goal was to try as closely as possible meld the generated scaffold_resource and the dynamic scaffolding call, so as to make included it in Rails a better possibility. As such any feedback is still most, most welcome, but any new functionality would probably go in a post 1.0 branch. And there are a number of more fully featured scaffoldingesque plugins out there already, anyways.

If you are using assert_select, which you should be, you might get into situations where you are unsure why it is failing, and its output isn’t always illuminating for that. You can do a quick sanity check by doing a

assert_dom_equal('foo', @response.body)

right before the failing tests and you’ll get the full response body for the test dumped to your console.

It’s useful for discovering things like the fact that you forgot the = in <%= yield %> in your test layout.

Ever get tired of the first result in your address bar dropdown for a given URL being a typo that goes to a 404? Well, you can delete just that entry, after all.

In Firefox, if you want to delete an individual entry from the History, just highlight it (either in the History sidebar or in the address bar drop-down) and press Shift+Delete.

from: downloadsquad

So I thought I’d hold onto Dreamhost as my primary host a while longer, but its driving me mad. It just won’t perform wortha snot, especially anything that depends on fcgi. Hence Trac and Typo (Rails is Apache fcgi on Dreamhost) are not exactly running up to snuff. But it’s not like anything has ever been going F1 speeds for me with them.

You want to know how I knew right away there was a comment posted on one of the entries? I have been giving the new Rails monitoring service, Heartbeat, a try, and I got a notification from them that my domain had changed from “200 OK” to timing out. Great, the load of serving up a couple page-views and handling a single comment pushed my Typo install to it’s limits.

I’m going to keep Dreamhost for storage, backup, and mirroring svn, since you get a lot for your dollar, but I can’t stand it as a primary domain any longer, even just for my blog and minor personal projects.