Bozo Users

September 30, 2008

Just installed bbPress for our team members and while cruising around the admin, saw this awesome plugin – ‘Bozo Users,’ which is described as: Allows moderators to mark certain users as a “bozo”. Bozo users can post, but their content is only visible to themselves. Now that’s funny.

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Scriptaculous drag and drop with Rails and the hoverclass

September 10, 2008

That’s a great title, eh? Sounds like a cool band doesn’t it? No band to speak of here, just a Rails oddity to mention about the sortable_element helper method. If you want to use the ‘hoverclass’ option, then be sure to quote it like this: “‘droppable’”, :url => {:controller => :projects, :action => :update_positions, :id [...]

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Cookieless sessions in Rails

May 13, 2008

We’re running an application on Facebook and are using the iframe setting. One of the disadvantages of this approach is that certain browsers, by default, will not accept cookies from third parties. In our situation, the third party is our application. Somewhat surprisingly the default privacy settings on the various browsers are not as you’d [...]

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IMageMagick on Ubuntu 7.04 – libMagickWand.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

April 16, 2008

The Rmagic docs have this FAQ: Help! I’m getting the message “libMagickWand.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” I know ImageMagick is installed! What should I do? The full text of the message is: /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.2.2/lib/RMagick2.so: libMagickWand.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory – /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.2.2/lib/RMagick2.so (LoadError) The message [...]

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Facebook development: choosing FBML or iframe as your application type

March 15, 2008

After lots of deliberation on the subject of which application type to use – FBML or iframe – we settled on a kludgey iframe/FBML hybrid, which basically means selecting ‘FBML’ as the app type and then making use of the <fb:iframe/> tag. This was in large part due to the fact that iframe didn’t support [...]

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Upgrading to Rails 2.0: template considerations

January 3, 2008

Rails 2.0 has better support for multiviews. I was aware of this having briefly read about it in the Rails blog, but didn’t pay a ton of attention until something wasn’t working the way it used to. I had a controller action that I wanted handeled by two different templates depending on the request type: [...]

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Safely Upgrading to Rails 2.0.1

December 10, 2007

When upgrading to 2.0.1 there are two ways to go. You can update your rails version server-wide via gems or by individual application. If you have access to the whole server, going the gem route is probably easiest. And you can have different rails gems installed without causing problems. You need to be sure, though, [...]

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Rails: MySql lost connection error with Mongrel

November 27, 2007

Having dealt with this lost connection issue more than a few times I thought I should write down the solution. From the Mongrel FAQs: Q: Mongrel stops working if it’s left alone for a long time. If you find that Mongrel stops working after a long idle time and you’re using MySQL then you’re hitting [...]

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I’m in the internet

November 25, 2007

Prior to reading reading a Jakob Nielsen article on the 10 *wrong* things one can do with a blog I was on the fence, really, as to whether having a photo was useful or not. But his argument seems pretty convincing: 2. No Author Photo Even weblogs that provide author bios often omit the author [...]

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FoxFilter is a great content filter for parents

November 24, 2007

As parents of a 7, 5 and 2 year old, watching the content your kids access becomes an issue pretty fast. When you see odd domain names in the URL history you know you need to put something in place. I tried glubble, but it was unnecessarily complex and bloated. I was happy to find [...]

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