Welcome to Jekyll!

28th February 2024
1 minute.
jekyll update
It’s alive! I’ve moved to Jekyll. Why? I fooled around with MiddleManApp, Sitepress and BrigeTown however I just prefered Jekyll. It has all the data and collection powers I need...

AWS CLI For People Used to Better Things Cheatsheet

19th May 2022
30 seconds.
Hosting
You probably have access to a bunch of aws accounts, because you are a working stiff that supports everybodies silly aws hosted websites. No probs, have multiple profiles List profiles:...

Easy Sortable Lists with Rails

27th November 2019
2 minutes.
Rails
What’s more fun than dragging and dropping to order stuff? Nothing that this blog will cover anyway. Draggable lists is easy-peasy with Rails 6, some gems, jquery-ui and webpacker. Here...

Rich Text with Trix and Action Text on Rails

11th November 2019
2 minutes.
rails cms
Most web applications I work on require a content editing feature that includes formatting, adding images etc. Now Rails comes with that bundled as ActionText. It’s awesome. Rails version 6...

Date And Time Formats With Rails

1st November 2019
1 minute.
Ruby, Rails
Rails comes with some default date and time formats. There are good docs for them here: Rails Date Class Rails DateTime Class Unfortunately, I don’t like the default formats! Or...

Using RBenv for Ruby Version Management Cheatsheet

20th October 2019
1 minute.
Ruby
Ruby versions on your development machine need to be carefully managed so you can work on different projects with the right ruby version. With Rbenv, that’s easy. Installation brew install...

Maps on Rails

4th October 2019
2 minutes.
Ruby Rails GIS
In a recent project we needed a map. Not just any map though. We needed to be able to add topo and satellite layers, add feature overlays from json feeds...

Ruby On Rails Geographical Tools

2nd August 2019
3 minutes.
Ruby, Rails, GIS
There is nothing quite like a geographicly aware web application. The data, the maps. It’s all very nice. With Ruby, some gems and Rails, it is all very easy too....

Testing With Rails ActiveStorage

1st August 2019
1 minute.
Rails
In an app I have been working on recently, I have a report model, with an attachment image, “overview”. This is an image uploaded to the app via the ActiveStorage...

Setting up Web Hosting with Ubuntu and Apache

7th June 2019
1 minute.
Hosting
Setting up hosting on a linux VPS with Ubuntu and apache is not too hard, as long as you stay on the path. Grab a box at DO and choose...

Transactional Email Services

12th March 2016
2 minutes.
Hosting, Hosted-Services
https://postmarkapp.com/ vs http://www.mailgun.com/ When mandril effectively shut down I needed a new transactional email system. Hosting my own SMTP for assorted clients is not my idea of a good time....

Transactional Email Services

12th March 2016
30 seconds.
servers, hosted-services

Transactional Email Services

12th March 2016
30 seconds.
servers, hosted-services
Start session psql List databases \l Create database createdb some_database Choose DB to work with \connect flex_development List all the tables \dt Get columns info for a table \d+ admin_users...

Switching To Middleman

1st March 2016
3 minutes.
CMS, Ruby, Blogging
Middlemanapp.com is a Ruby based static site generator. It is incredibly flexible, allowing the designer to use any of the ruby based templating languages, HTML or Markdown to build a...

Rails UJS for Forms

16th December 2015
1 minute.
Rails
JS frameworks are fun, but for most apps a sprinkling of JavaScript and Rails RJS gets a lot done, it’s simple to use and easy to maintain. Often, a feature...

Installing (and Fixing) Node, NPM and maybe Grunt on OSX

9th December 2015
1 minute.
Terminal
Problems with Node? It’s not uncommon. So, have you got the latest version? node -v v0.10.28 npm -v 0.01 OK, that’s not good. Even if you have newish versions though...

Static Site on s3 With Cloudflare

7th December 2015
2 minutes.
Hosting, DNS
If you want to set up a simple static site, amazon’s s3 service is a great choice. S3 is simple to use, reliable and very very cheap. Ideal for simple...

How to Clear DNS for OSX

12th September 2015
30 seconds.
Terminal
You made a change to your DNS. You wanna test it. Is it workin? To clear the DNS, do this: sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder then go to chrome://net-internals/#dns and click...

Intro to Ruby Regular Expressions

12th May 2015
1 minute.
Ruby
Regular Expressions are used to match patterns to strings. They are super powerful and very scary. If you use them badly your code can become totally un-maintainbale and confusing. When...

Getting Started with Terminal

1st January 2015
30 seconds.
Terminal
<3 Your Terminal Is terminal in your Doc? do you use it? If not you are missing out as a web professional. Learning a few commands, or at least being...