Ready to create a great looking admin menu in minutes using CSS? We will use gradients and icons to create a sharp looking menu. It will also provide visual feedback through hover effects for the user to improve their experience.
It’s called the pharma hack. And it is clever. It is a website hack that exploits your site without you knowing. The site will appear normal for visitors but the pharma hack inserts code to promote Viagra and similar drugs as your description in Google search results. The hack has now been updated to also hijack the description in Facebook when a page is shared on it. And I just had a site hacked by it.
Fun stuff! Or not… Read More
A common error on Heroku’s Cedar Stack is during precompile for assets:
could not connect to server: Connection refused. Is the server running on host “127.0.0.1″ and accepting TCP/IP connections on port xxxx?
This issue is resolved by disabling the app initializing for compiling assets. But I came across a situation where that solution caused further issues. This was due to the js-routes gem needing info about routes from my app. This forced me to compile my assets every time I pushed changes to Heroku. It quickly becomes annoying running this task all the time and then having caching issues during development.
Heroku Labs to the rescue! There is a experimental feature that allows the app to be initialized during precompile by allowing user variables to be accessed. Read More
Widgets! I get very excited about widgets and their use. You should identify sections on a site that can be modular. Using and creating widgets gives the owner control (very important) to make changes without needing a developer. It saves money and time which is a great selling point for freelancers. Widgets are typically found in blog sections but can be used outside of the blog. Our homepage makes use of widgets for calls to action. The latest project section is easy to update and can be swapped out for another section such as testimonials. Interested in learning more? Find easy steps for converting a section to a WordPress widget below.
Google is quietly growing Plus while everyone still tries to compare it to Facebook. They recently launched a new service with Google+ to link profiles with blog entries in search results. The blog post will be displayed as a verified author with the author’s Google+ profile picture. It increases people clicking to the post and gives it more real estate on the search results page .
That is the biggest concern I hear from business owners and rightfully so. It can be frustrating to not have control over your website. You may also be losing money due to not having the right content addressing your visitors.
Check out below for suggestions of updates to your site that are cost effective.
Here are my slides for my talk last night at Chicago’s MongoDB user group. Check out Speaker Deck for sharing slides. Ordered List is a terrific company that runs it.
Also, the example code I used can be found at https://gist.github.com/1368469. It uses the Mongo Ruby driver to query a MongoDB server.
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I posted the slides from my talk on using MongoDB and Ruby on Rails that I gave at MongoChicago. It discusses the choices made for the technology stack and also using Mongoid as the Object Mapper for MongoDB. The video should be up shortly on http://www.10gen.com. I will post when it is available.
“I have an idea!” Awesome. Send me an email.
Being a web developer and a technical advisor, I hear these words a lot and I always respond the same way. Send me an email. Everyone has an idea and we all know that. The simple act of writing a quick short email is a difference maker. Maybe at most 5% of the people will follow up with an email. And all of them end up growing their idea into something more.
It is so easy to get caught up in all the possibilities of your future business. How it will be promoted on all the tech blogs, the 30,000 facebook fans you will have, the huge potential of investments… So what’s your business again? Do you have dates or milestones? Focus on your idea and business before all of that. Don’t get too far ahead with the what if’s and build something substantial. Something of quality. Something that solves a problem. The rest will come.
I recently had the opportunity to present at Chicago’s MongoDB user group about using Mongoid with Ruby on Rails. It was great to see so many people interested in it. I plan to write more on the Mongoid topic but in the meantime I wanted to share several resources I used to get up to speed with Mongoid.
Mongoid.org
The most obvious resource is the official site for Mongoid. It is a great resource to begin with the basics from the available field types and associations to querying.
Rails 3, Mongoid, and Devise + Tutorial
This is an example application with a detailed step by step tutorial for setting up Rails 3, Mongoid, and Devise. Even if you are not interested in using Devise for authentication, it still has a lot to offer in getting a Mongoid application running. Definitely a must!
Carrierwave and Mongoid(GridFS – MongoDB)
This post talks about getting file uploading working with GridFS and Mongoid. I store files in several projects using MongoDB and GridFS. Carrierwave is a great gem to use and this post covers the details in getting it all to work.
RailsCasts – Mongoid
That is actually a link for the Asciicast of the video. I prefer reading, especially for a reference, over video. This is another great resource for getting started with Mongoid.
If anyone has any others, leave in the comments below and I will add it to the list. Make sure to come back for future articles on using Mongoid and Rails 3.
