My name is Joel
I work on the web making stuff I like. I live in Boston(-ish) with my wife and our English Bulldog.
Archive for the ‘Site Work’ Category
That’s it. I’m going naked.
Monday, December 28th, 2009
No, not without my clothes. That would be, just … not right.
This website had been in its previous state for a while, probably the last year or so, with little traction. The vast majority of this stagnation being due to my working on implementing a design put together by the always amazing Erika Greco (she designed my wife’s site – Bit By the Beauty Bug). I loved what Erika had done – and I worked on getting it juuuust right for a long time. After months and months of on and of work on implementing this beautiful work I decided – “It’s time to get back to the basics”. There’s no need to get stuck in the cycle of working and re-working ad nauseum (my name is not George Broussard).
So, I’m deciding to strip everything down to the barest of mark-up and style and concentrate on letting this “brand” or “identity” grow organically through either the content or whatever incremental changes I feel are right. Instead of trying to hit a done target, let’s get real and let this grow organically to a point where I feel it’s done enough.
What does this do for me, you might ask? It allows me to write without a nagging voice in the back of my head saying “you can publish this once the new redesign is live”. When new projects I’m working on launch – I’m just going to post something about it instead of worrying that “the portfolio section of the site isn’t done yet … oh the horror!”.
Over time I hope to make some incremental changes to make things less ugly, but only time will tell. I’ll be documenting things as they change for posterity’s sake so I can review how time has treated it, and maybe share its mutation with everyone with hopes any and all feedback would make me better.
So, please bear with me while I hang out here all exposed and vulnerable and stuff. It’s only appropriate to bring in 2010 like Baby New Year.
Posted in Site Work, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Using Google Apps Email as Your App’s SMTP Server
Monday, April 27th, 2009
Something I’ve held out on for a while now has been to switch over the settings for ActionMailer in my application(s) to point to my hosted Google apps account. I figured it was probably time to do so as piping email notifications through my comcast email account is generally, probably, a bad idea (courtesy of the “No Duh” department).
Seems like it should be rather easy, no? Just change action mailer to resemble:
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "hosteddomain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "account@hosteddomain.com",
:password => "omgsup3rsecret"
}
Meh. Looks easy enough, right? Except for the fact Google’s got some magic TLS authentication thing going on – you’ll run into an error in your mailers resembling Must issue a STARTTLS command first.. Enough to make you work a little harder to get the magic working.
For those of you/us that are running Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.x the answer is rather simple – add :enable_starttls_auto => true to your smtp settings, which will result in :
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "hosteddomain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "account@hosteddomain.com",
:password => "omgsup3rsecret"
}
And for the rest of you/us (that would be me) that are still sticking with Ruby 1.8.6, there is an answer in the form of the action_mailer_tls gem. Following the readme will get you to right where you want to be – shoveling all the mail you would like into the ether that is the interwebs.
Tags: email, gmail, google, rails, ruby, smtp
Posted in Site Work, Web Development, internet | No Comments »
Difference between :collection and :member in Rails 2.0
Monday, August 11th, 2008
In getting up to speed with the new bells and whistles in Rails 2.0s RESTful routing capabilities I ran into something that puzzled me. Of the options for a resource defined among your routes there were two similar pieces that, for one reason or another, I could just not find a solid and bulletproof explanation for – :collection and :member. The :member part of it I got pretty easily for some reason, because its description is inherent in its own name … “a member among the default restful actions”. The :collection part? Notsomuch. After some digging in the Rails mailing list I ran into a great, and worthy, explanation for this knucklehead by a contributer named “deegee”:
For example, with map.resources :reviews, if you want to add a method ‘delete_all’ that deletes all reviews at once. You may want to call that with ‘/reviews/delete_all’ and method PUT (never use GET to delete something). This method is acting on all resources (a collection), so the route should be:
map.resources :reviews, :collection => { :delete_all => :put }
If you want to have a custom action acting on a specific resource, e.g. ‘/reviews/3/give_rating’, then your action is on a member and the route would be
map.resources :reviews, :member => { :give_rating => :put }
So that’s it! They’re the same other than :member working on a single resource, while :collection works on multiple. DONE!
Tags: development, enlightenment, rails, Work
Posted in Site Work, Web Development, Work | 1 Comment »