Posts from PluginAWeek...

Viximo: We want you. We need you.

Not happy with your current job? Stuck in a code formatting war with your coworker? Can’t seem to convince your boss that Chuck Norris was written in Ruby? We can help with that. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up at your company and believe whatever you want to believe Welcome to [...]
Tags: general, chuck_norris, digital_goods, jobs, viximo

acts_as_what?

This guy’s expression pretty much sums up my reaction whenever a new acts_as_* shows up in my RSS feed for AgileWebDevelopment plugins. As of today, there are 1,115 plugins listed there, 129 of which start with acts_as. That’s about 11.5% and I’m not even including ones like acts_as_hasselholf or acts_as_rickroll acts_as_chuck_norris is [...]
Tags: rails, acts_as, chuck_norris, naming

Git up, Git on up

Well what do ya know… Pandora, Twitter, Lost, and GitHub have something in common after all! Yeah, so I sort of avoided jumping on the bandwagon for a while, but each time I keep caving under pressure … although I’m still reluctant to admit that I’ve ever watched an episode of Lost. So that’s big [...]
Tags: general, github, lighthouse, subversion, trac

Rails 2.1 Certified

Toot toot! Rails 2.1 is almost out and the gravy train has set sail, full speed ahead! Are you excited? I know the girl to the left here is. She’s totally psyched about the upcoming release. Screw barbie dolls, you’ve got some upgrading to do! You’ll be happy to know that [...]
Tags: rails, gravy_train, ice_cream, rails_2.1, spaghetti

Go green with 5 lines of Ruby

I decided to go “green” last weekend and spend a little time reducing the energy consumption of my computer. See, I’ve always left my desktop computer on at home while I’ve been at work or asleep. I’m sort of lazy and suspend never really worked that well in Ubuntu. After upgrading to 8.04 and [...]
Tags: ruby, energy, green, hack

A fresh perspective

Looking back on past code oftentimes gives us all a case of the “What was I thinking?”. You could just ignore svn blame and pretend you didn’t write it, but you did. You sucked. And that’s okay. It’s hard (read: impossible) to write perfect code the first time; there are too [...]
Tags: rails, elegance, gravy_train, merb, tips

POPSignal in Boston

Tonight I’ll be at POPSignal in Boston, a party graciously organized in part by Brian Balfour, the founder of our company (Viximo). Hope to share a beer with you there.
Tags: general, boston, popsignal, viximo

A prelude

What good would a comeback be if there wasn’t some Rocky story about how I found myself at the end of the road, the bottom of the bottle, the back of the bus, only to be miraculously motivated to push myself to the limits to get back in shape and fight for glory? That [...]
Tags: general, prelude, rocky, rubyman, viximo

Hello, World

It’s been almost a year since we last talked. How have you been? How are the kids? A lot has happened in the last year as I disappeared and found people playing “Where in the world is Aaron Pfeifer?” looking for information about PluginAWeek. Well, I have good news. It’s back. Things are [...]
Tags: general, carmen_sandiego, update

#14: Fix your Fixtures with Fewer Foreign Key IDs

Phew! Try saying that 5 times fast! Actually, if you’re in a public library or something, you might want to wait ’til you get home. People might think you’re weird :-P. So it’s been a few weeks… Seems like eons to me! As you can imagine, we’re a bit off our expected [...]
Tags: migrations, active_record, rails

Theme Disappeared…

It appears as though our customized theme for this website disappeared in a recent WordPress upgrade… hopefully we’ll get it back up within the next 24 hours. P.S. Don’t worry, we’re still here
Tags: off_topic

Subversion repository undergoing maintenance

Just as a heads up to anyone who might be affected, our subversion repository will be undergoing maintenance today to fix some major speed issues we’ve been experiencing. We think we’ve pinned down the problem. We’ll let you know when the maintenance is complete. Thanks! 12:36 PM: Trac is going down as well… 3:10 PM: Subversion [...]
Tags: general

Preparing for 0.1.0 plugins_plus milestone

If you’ve been watching trac, you may have noticed a flurry of activity and major changes being made to the plugins_plus plugins (plugin_dependencies, loaded_plugins, appable_plugins, plugin_migrations, plugin_assets, and plugin_routing). We’ve reached a long-overdue milestone and will be releasing 0.1.0 gems of each of these plugins in the upcoming week or two. There have been many, [...]
Tags: plugins, rails

#13: plugins_plus becomes a reality

We’ve reverted the below change in favor of using svn:externals (instead of moving the original plugin locations, duh!). Warning: plugins_plus has resulted in changes to the repository location of the following plugins: appable_plugins loaded_plugins plugin_assets plugin_dependencies plugin_migrations plugin_routing Their new locations are at http://svn.pluginaweek.org/trunk/plugins/rails/plugins_plus/lib/. Please update your svn:externals appropriately. When we first released the above listed plugins, one of the things we pointed [...]
Tags: plugins, rails

#12: Models seek damages for Identity Theft

In other news today, the Associated Press is reporting that models around the world have been stripped of their identity in what appears to be the largest case of identity theft to date. According to a spokesman from the United States Justice Department, a ring of thieves going by the name “polymorphic associations” have [...]
Tags: associations, plugins, active_record

#11: Rails Learns a Slick New Trick - Class Associations

I have to admit, of all the plugins we have, this is definitely on my Top 5 Favorites list. It took me a long, long time to finally realize that this was a missing piece in ActiveRecord that kept making me feel uncomfortable with the way I was interacting with my models. It, [...]
Tags: active_record, plugins, associations

Plugin updates, gem releases, pet projects, and new plugins

Just thought we’d give everyone an update on all that’s been going on around PluginAWeek for the past few days. Updated plugins If you’ve been watching trac at all, you’ll notice I’ve been a busy bee, making long overdue updates to our existing plugins. Most notably, changes made to loaded_plugins that were breaking a few other [...]
Tags: general

Trac/Wiki/Blog being upgraded, plugins undergoing gem changes…

Just as a heads up to anyone that may be affected, the PluginAWeek trac, wiki, and blog will be undergoing upgrades this afternoon. In addition, all of the plugins we’ve released so far are getting their gem counterparts published. You’ll be able to take a peek at them over at our RubyForge page. [...]
Tags: rails

RailsConf Proposal Rejected :(

Well, can’t say we didn’t try. Unfortunately, our conference proposal wasn’t accepted this year for RailsConf 2007. For those interested, here’s a copy of the proposal: So Easy a Caveman Can Do It: A Fresh Approach to E-commerce in Ruby on Rails Imagine if our e-commerce applications could flex a little more, could be a little smarter, [...]
Tags: rails

boolean_attributes: Revisited! In record time!

Well, the WordPress gods struck down on me last night when they deleted the boolean attributes post. Luckily, PlanetRubyOnRails had a full copy of it just waiting for me. Phew! Good thing too! It got a couple people to start talking about it and they've got some pretty interesting solutions. [...]
Tags: ruby
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