John Yerhot / Weblog /

Against the advice of, well, the entire Rails community, I attempted to deploy a project to Godaddy.
Godaddy proudly displays the little Ruby logo next to Php when browsing through their hosting plans, and seeing as you can get Rails hosting for $7/month through them, it seems like a decent deal, even if you know it’s [...]

I merged some stock quoting stuff I had into a Rails plugin today. If you’d like to be able to simply grab real time stock quotes in your Rails app, this will do the job. Pretty much any stock symbol will work and you can enter as many as you’d like, you’ll get [...]

I’ve sort of finished up rDigg today. It’s to the point I’m comfortable letting other people start to play with it anyways.
As you’d expect, rDigg is a Digg API wrapper in the form of a Ruby on Rails plugin. It still needs some work, but works pretty well.
For example:
#create new Rdigg object
digg [...]

Metaprogramming.  What a lovely buzz word.  I guess I’ve heard it enough and knew what the short definition is. Metaprogramming is code that writes code.  I think it is one of those things I just never thought about, even though I had used concepts and even written some before without realizing it until recently.
Here [...]

Alrighty folks. Quick walk though for scraping remote web data with Ruby. This is how I did it for my little web scraper I wrote on Saturday..
DISCLAIMER: Web Scraping is kind of a gray area.. don’t steal things that are copywritten and don’t be a jerk. Give credit where credit is due..
First [...]

Today I set up 470.johnyerhot.com and set up a Rails app I worked on to run there, but I needed to install the Pdf-writer Gem for proper functionality. Low and behold when I tried
sudo gem install pdf-writer
I was greeted with nothing, just
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
and that was it. After searching and [...]

I’ve spend all morning trying to get this to work.  I am using nice menus and the frontpage modules in Drupal for a project at work and I could not for the life of me get the nice menu to work on the newly created frontpage I set up using “full” type of front page.
After [...]

Heres the week in review:
-Linux Mint home networking is now done and working beautifully. Had some trouble getting the onboard Via Chrome9 Video working correctly, but I followed the instructions here(compiling it from source) and everything was great. I wanted to use the OpenChrome driver instead of the VESA driver because the OpenChrome [...]

Yeah, I came up with this little Rails rake task called ‘rake leaves’. It will just create a text file that has all your tables, column names, and their data types. I’ve always thought it would be handy to have this so you don’t need to switch to MySQL and spend the time [...]

This morning there was a guy in the rails IRC room asking about using helpers in his controller and I recently wrote an app that used the great pdf-writer gem to generate some pdfs and used helpers in the controller for formatting in the pdf. If you are going to generate very complicated pdfs, [...]