Just a short heads up that I’ve updated the will_paginate_liquidized plugin to work with the latest (Chrismas 07) edition of will_paginate.

Like its name says will_paginate_liquidized enables will_paginate to be used within Liquid templates. You can find more about it here: will_paginate_liquidized plugin project page.

I’ve just released a first version of the Google Analytics plugin for Ruby on Rails that I’ve done in the course of the offer to build custom plugins for Mephisto users.

You can grab the plugin and read more about it here: Ruby on Rails Plugin: Google Analytics (blue egg edition)

Eran Ben Sabat was the first to contact me about this offer and suggested that I could write a Google Analytics plugin which he was interested in.

By now there’s another interesting request by Thilo Thamm who asked for a plugin for allowing users to add blog posts. This sounds like another great idea for a useful plugin and I plan to tackle this one next.

I was totally thrilled how much fun it was to work with both Liz and Eran Ben Sabat on their plugins. So my offer still stands. If you have an idea for a nice plugin, don’t hesitate to drop me a note.

So, James Adam has published a preview release version of Engines for Rails 2.0 that I’ve helped to put together. Let me quote James from his announcement on the Rails engines mailinglists:

Just a quick note to let you know, should it be relevant, that we’ve readied a new release of the Engines plugin, revamped and ready for Rails 2.0, and would absolutely love for you to start using it and sending feedback about what’s broken, what’s missing and what could be improved.

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When I recently started to help porting Rails Engines to Rails 2.0 I haven’t found a complete big-picture walkthrough for the Rails startup process.

There are some really useful resources about this (see the end of this article) but they are for Rails 1.2 (some things have changed quite a bit in Rails 2.0) and each of them only covers certain parts of the process.

Thus, I’ve taken some notes while reading to the Rails code and compiled the following guide from them.

This article intends to walk you through the startup process in a whirlwind-speedy way, yet sticking closely to the actual code. I’ve added links to the code browser on dev.rubyonrails.org so you can look at the code lines while reading this article.

Of course, any feedback, corrections or additions are highly appreciated.

For popular demand (that is, if you agree to call a request by someone like Liz popular) here’s a really tiny plugin for Mephisto that allows you to have a full archive page.

By “full archive” simply a list of all your blog posts is meant, most probably just titles grouped by month. This is supported by quite some big blogging engines.

To learn how to install and use this plugin just head over to my project page: Mephisto Plugin: Full Archives (tricky edition)

File this as either a bumbling, fingers-all-thumbs attempt at viral self marketing or the het up utterings of a developer playing with his latest mini pet project toy. ;-)

Ok, I love GTD. I’ve been addicted to it for about one and a half year now. I’ve read Dave Allens book more than just once and tweaked my implementation again and again, discussing with friends and collegues … and still I find myself helplessly stuck at times.

At the very least, over the time I’ve been able to identify quite accurately what requirements my perfect “trusted system” would meet and probably more importantly: what it easily could omit.

Just a short note for those of you who are using my Mephisto Inverse Captcha plugin:

I’ve recieved some feedback that the way the plugin was implemented apperently caused problems in fcgi environments. I’ve simplified the plugin loading quite a bit and now it seems to work fine.

I’ve got it running here on my own blog, too, with Rails 2.0PR and Mephisto rev2983 and it continues to work like a charm :) Actually, I have no spam comments thanks to it.

If you further encounter any problems please let me know :)

It took me a while to find relevant some info on this, so I thought I’d blog about it for others to find this more quickly with the keywords that I thought were a good starting point at first.

I’ve been running an outdated version of Mongrel (1.0.1 as of Jan 07) when I switched to Leopard. Everything continued to work fine except that I noticed (a while later) some the Ajax calls that call Net::HTTP to load some info from a webservice or external website would take very long or even would timeout.

I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but Apple seems to have changed a lot in how Mac OS X handles DNS lookups in Leopard … and these seem to block when they didn’t in Tiger.

I talked about why we need a better Mephisto tag cloud plugin recently and that it probably should use the Boldr plugin as a basis. Sadly nobody really seems to care about this at Boldr.net. Well, there’re more important things than building another tagcloud for Mephisto, right?

Thus I started to revamp a brand new tag cloud plugin for Mephisto which is now available in the Subversion Repository … and of course I really believe that it is the most sophisticated, customizable, standard-conform and overall awesome implementation of a tag cloud for Mephisto ;). Why, yes, obviously I’m a little biased, so judge for yourself!

Hey, just in case you missed this like I did: there’s a video of Saimon Moore’s conference session about Globalize at ”Ostrava on Rails” available online!

The video probably leaves something to be desired regarding the allover quality, but hey! At least you can now watch one of our star developers giving an introduction to Globalize on Rails and that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

So, go and grab the video here: Saimon Moore’s conference session about Globalize.

Like Saimon mentions this in his conference roundup there are also videos of several other interesting sessions available like those of Jamis Buck (about, guess what, deployment with Capistrano) and Tobias Lütke (about how he got shopify to where it is today).

Like I mentioned an updated version of the Mephisto Paged Article Lists plugin is available in the Subversion repository. You can grab this awesome stuff right here: http://svn.artweb-design.de/stuff/mephisto/mephisto_paged_article_list

Like with the Inverse Captcha Plugin some more information about the new version of this plugin are due, too. So, what’s new here?

I mean, really … aren’t there any more important things on earth than a tagcloud plugin for your favorite rockstar blogging engine? Most probably! But then again, on my blog I really love to use stuff that pays some attention to details. Somehow a piece of great code can save my day.

The Mephisto community has come up with at least four different tagcloud plugins yet and none of them seems to meet the usual, basic requirements. There’s one plugin though that - with just some additional love - could pretty much make its way to the perfect Mephisto TagCloud plugin.

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After I had revamped my initial experimental approach to the “Inverse Captcha” anti-spam technique as a regular Mephisto Plugin lately I have promised to explain how you can use it to get rid of your blog comment spam.

This plugin is getting a bunch of additional attention these days, especially after it was linked to in Quarks’ Ruby on Rails Security Guide. So, some additional information is past due. There you go.

Sometimes you just want less noise in your log files, especially when your Globalize setup runs pretty fine and you don’t need it to tell you about every single move it makes: Globalize can be just too chatty then.

Joost Hietbrink thought this, too, and sent me the following code snippet. So you don’t need to suffer from Globalize’s chattiness any more :-)

Hey, I just noticed that bundled Javascript and CSS assets will be supported natively in Rails 2.0! David even selected this feature as one of those prominent Rails 2.0 features that he presented during his keynote at the RailsConf Chicago 2007 on May 18th.