Jerod Santo

So there is this really cool Rack middleware written by Simon Jefford which allows you to send arbitrary messages from your Rails controllers & views directly to Firebug’s (or Web Inspector’s) console.

Another month, another handful of great open-source projects I found on GitHub.

One of my favorite GitHub features is the ability to find and track the progress of projects that interest me.

I’m happy to announce the release of CappuccinoResource (CR), a library dedicated to interfacing between a Cappuccino front-end and a Rails back-end.

Writing a web app using Cappuccino has a lot of benefits, one of which is a really nice message passing system wherein certain objects can register to observe events and take action when other objects post notifications of those events.

Most of the online regular expression testers I’ve used just aren’t that useful, but Rubular is the exception.

The much anticipated 280 Atlas developer beta is under way and I recorded a brief screencast introducing the basic concepts of creating applications with Atlas.

Have you ever spent way too much time babysitting a long-running command?

I just added two new functions to my bashrc which make it super-simple to find & remove broken symbolic links on your system.

Picking up a new framework can be a daunting task, especially if you’re simultaneously learning a new language.

File this one under** “scratching my own itch”** A Problem I often use WordPress as a CMS and have a couple of sites with many users contributing.

Fellow command-line junkies either love the cheat gem by Chris Wanstrath or they’ve never heard of it.

In Brief I just launched CappuccinoFlow: a community driven link blog for the Cappuccino framework.

OS X’s built-in System Profiler provides a great graphical display of pretty much anything you’ll want to know about your Mac.

Command-line jockeys are intimately familiar with the cd command.

Looks like I’m not the only one who hates Snow Leopard’s blue ring around selected windows in Exposé.

A lot of people end up writing Ruby methods that looks something like this: def stop_error(message) puts "ERROR: #{message}" exit(1) end Which they call in their app like so: stop_error "Oh noes, file doesn't exist!"

So I was writing my first iPhone on Rails app when my Google Reader dropped some pretty awful news on me.

Whenever is an awesome library that: “provides a clean ruby syntax for defining messy cron jobs and running them Whenever.

I recently learned that you can fix you’re previous commit (modify commit message, add more files, etc.) quite easily with git.

I just finished reading Gregory Brown’s “Ruby Best Practices” (RBP).

It’s been awhile since I posted about my open-source WordPress Console (WPC) plugin, and enough has happened since I released it that I thought it deserved a little mention.

I recently found a couple of cool old tricks for logging Rails activity directly to the console, but these solutions are pretty static once you’re inside a console session.

Some CSS techniques require me to Google about like a chicken with its head cut off.

Plugin upgrade notifications and one-click installs are great for both developers and users alike, but there is one thing about them that I find irritating as a user, and easily avoidable as a developer: displaying reasons to upgrade.

jQuery Tools is the new kid on the block when it comes to jQuery-based user interface libraries.

One killer feature of Ruby on Rails (for me) is script/console.

Ever wanted (or needed) to see your iPhone’s network traffic?

OS X ships with PHP5 installed but it does not have readline() support compiled in.

A Capistrano task to install Ruby 1.9.1 to /opt/ruby-1.9.1 on Debian: APTGET = "apt-get install -qqy" RUBY19 = "ruby-1.9.1-p129" SRC = "/usr/local/src" WGET = "wget -q" namespace :ruby do desc 'download and compile Ruby 1.9' task :install_19 do

Deploying a Rails app used to suck.

I use gitosis for private git repository hosting (and it’s awesome).

For the uninitiated, Heroku is a “cloud” (hate that term) hosting service for Ruby applications.

Ok, so I’m having fun with this “in less than 15 lines of Ruby” idea, but this time I turn my attention away from Twitter (I know, that’s hard to do right now) and toward file generation.

The common technique to force links to open a new window or tab is to add a target attribute like so: <a href="http://hulu.com" target="_blank">check it out</a> This works just fine but is not actually valid markup.

The common technique to force links to open a new window or tab is to add a target attribute like so: <a href="http://hulu.com" target="_blank">check it out</a> This works just fine but is not actually valid markup.

A great way to meet new people on Twitter is by checking out the people your friends are interacting with.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve gotten accustomed to commands like this: jerod@mbp:~$ ssh [user]@[remote.server.com] If you find yourself connecting to the same machines repeatedly, save a few keystrokes by creating a handy alias for them.

The asynchronous nature of Twitter is one of its keys to success.

First Input: $(document).ready(function() { $('input:text:first').focus(); }); First Empty Input: $(document).ready(function() { $('input:text[value=""]:first').focus(); });

Good security require defense in depth.

The folks at DreamHost were gracious enough to provide me with a complimentary Private Server account so I could expand Dreamy’s functionality.

I just published my 2nd WordPress plugin, Clean WP Dashboard.

The anointing of an OS X application:

Many web developers are discontinuing support for IE6.

DreamHost is running a kick-off competition in support of their newly released API.

A common practice when adding entries to crontab is to end the entry like this: >/dev/null 2>&1 The purpose of this is to suppress any output from the command itself, because we’re not interested.

If you’re trying to backup a remote host using rsnapshot (or rsync by itself) and run into one of the following ambiguous errors: rsnapshot version: ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 12 while processing ...

IPTables is a powerful but cryptic firewall solution.

A project I’m working on required a little more from Ruby’s TMail library than it offers out of the box.