has_many :thoughts: Tag plugins

More rubyish finders

Colin A. Bartlett — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:37:00 -0400

I just came across this little plugin which seems to make the writing of ActiveRecord finders much more rubyesque.

query = User.find do
    name = persons_name?
end

Definitely seems nicer then:

User.find(:conditions=>["name=?",persons_name])

CAPTCHA for the greater good

Colin A. Bartlett — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:17:00 -0400

We all know those annoying CAPTCHA things where you copy down the letters and digits from the image to prove you’re not a computer.

I like the concept of them and they can be quite handy, although on a large scale they are largely ineffective against determined individuals.

Carnegie Melon University has come up with a way to put all those (they claim over 60 million a day) CAPTCHA translations to good use… scanning books intro electronic format.

reCAPTCHA is a technology that uses words scanned in from books through archive.org. You are presented two words: one the OCR software already knows and one it doesn’t. You translate both to text. If you get the known one correct, it assumes you got the unknown one correct as well.

This is a great idea and a great way to put all those unused “cycles” of human intelligence. We have a few upcoming projects that might need to use CAPTCHA and I hope to use reCAPTCHA as part of the. ~~-Perhaps even create a Rails plugin to use it.~~- (Looks like there already is a Rails plugin… cool!)

Plugins we're using

Colin A. Bartlett — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:30:00 -0400

I thought it might be nice to share what plugins we’re using in some of our apps:

action_mailer_layouts
Adds some handy functionality allowing ActionMailer to use layouts just like any other view. I was surprised this doesn’t come out of the box with Rails but this plugin handles it nicely. Makes mailings dry when you want to have layouts that wrap around multiple emails.
acts_as_state_machine
Interesting little tool that allows you to define various states (aka statuses) and define various events that transition ActiveRecord objects from one state to another. It’s handy to help organize items that have many states.
human_attribute_override
Handy when you have columns with legacy naming conventions (or lack of conventions) or even when you change the name of a column but don’t feel like actually changing the name in the database. Things like validation errors use the human_name of a column to make it friendly looking and this allows you to set it to whatever you want.
acts_as_ferret
Full text index searching of AR items. Works great and easy to implement!
betternestedset
This is an improved version of the nested set functionality that comes with Rails. We actually ended up not using this but still have it installed on the project. I don’t remember why we didn’t use it… I think because acts_as_tree sufficed just fine for our needs.
fckeditor
A decent HTML editor that’s open source and nicely customizable.
geokit
We use this to detect the country of origin of a visitor via IP address and direct them to a country specific version of their site.
ssl_requirement
Handy tool that allows you to set specific actions on specific controllers as either requiring or not allowing SSL. Really helps you cut down on server load by not allowing HTTPS on pages that really don’t need it.
to_csv
Takes a collection of AR objects and spits it out into a line of comma delimited text with one simple method call.
redcloth
Adds textile lightweight markup capability. I simply adore textile.
sparklines
Geoff Grosenbach’s handy little plugin that makes really neat little graphs. Graphs without keys or even numbers but just enough info to give you context for a chunk of data.