Stateless components are nice. They are simple to use and understand but can become tricky when you start thinking about data and how to manage state. In general, the consensus seems to be that if your UI is going to need state, then at least the componen...

To get a Gravatar you need to hash an email address with the MD5 algorithm. MD5 is a part of the Ruby standard library. Rails loads it by default, but otherwise you will have to require it yourself. This is a simple implementation. Gravatar su...

This is one of my favorite videos on the internet. It is what got me interested in Rails and made me work toward the goal of running my own business and hopefully soon, launch my own products. ...

Uncompress a bz2 file using tar command tar --use-compress-program bzip2 -xvf your-file-to-uncompress.tar.bz2 @source http://www.kde.gr.jp/help/doc/kdebase/doc/khelpcenter/faq/HTML/bzip2.html...

What is Rack? Rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and sof...

I usually change some of the default settings when I use the Paperclip plugin. For most of my projects I don't like having separate directories for each image that is uploaded. I prefer, in this instance, to put avatars of different sizes together under o...

A buddy of mine is a talented, but paranoid System Administrator for a small web company. He refuses to see the truth and the beauty in the wonderful world made possible by cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2. Amazon is not the only game in town. T...