A new code repository for useful stuff at artweb-design.de

posted: April 22nd, 2007 · by: Sven

in: Programming, Misc stuff · tagged as: , , , ·  3 comments »

Update: some of the links in this summary might not work anymore and some information may be outdated. I’ve changed some of my code repository structure and some of the code has evolved. I’ve set up a central page though which I’ll keep updated. You can find it here: Small projects, plugins, patches and stuff like that.

Those of you who are subscribed to my RSS feed might have noticed that I’ve updated some URLs to plugins and patches in recent articles. That’s because I’ve decided that it’s a cool idea to have an own repository for “stuff” like: plugins, patches, utilities and the like. You can find it at http://stuff.artweb-design.de/svn.

I’ve also set up a Trac for this repository just to be able to track commits at http://trac.artweb-design.de. I don’t think that I’m ever going to need the tickets and wiki portions so that’s rather oversized. But Trac is already running for other projects, so that’s been the easiest way to get something going.

I’m going to add more stuff subsequently. Currently there are the following bits and pieces checked in yet.

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Allow custom column types in your Rails migrations

posted: April 7th, 2007 · by: Sven

in: Programming · tagged as: , , , , , , ·  12 comments »

We’ll all admit it. Rails’ migrations rock. Totally.

But when you try to change a database column to some vendor specific type (like varbinary for MySQL) that Rails doesn’t implement you notice that Rails doesn’t hand over control that easily here like it does elsewhere in ActiveRecord. You’re just not supposed to use any custom types.

This article explains how to easily change that behaviour.

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Patch Mephisto to add a comments list filter

posted: April 4th, 2007 · by: Sven

in: Programming · tagged as: , , , , , ·  4 comments »

Mephisto is backed by Akismet when it comes to comment-spam-protection and this duo works pretty well. But like any such system it’s not 100% foolproof and therefor Rick has build it that way that comments are put aside, not completely deleted when Akismet thinks that it’s spam. You’re supposed to log into the admin interface, go to “Moderate comments” and then review them. You can approve or delete the comments separately or delete them all at once.

That’s all pretty reasonable and handy. But when I scrolled through my 900 spam comments yesterday I found myself really wanting to filter the list by keywords like “cialis” or “toyota” (what the heck is so cool about Toyota newly?). This way I could reduce the list by the largest portions in some steps and then only have to review the rest of it.

I looked at the source code and found that it’s pretty super simple to patch in support for this kind of feature. So, here you go.

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artweb design
Sven Fuchs
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