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.

image credits

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.

Nick Pearson has posted a great tip in the comments on how he uses the Bundled Assets plugin with Rails’ built-in Javascript and stylesheet helpers.

I myself have always been using this plugin with just hardcoded Javascript/CSS include tags … so I haven’t been aware that it’s that easy to do!

The original article is pretty long already and I guess it makes sense to post this tip as an article on its own. So here we go …

image credits

Ok. I’ve upgraded my blog to Mephisto Edge.

It’s been something like nine months since the last official 0.7.3 Noh-Varr release and in Rails time that’s a pretty long time. There’s a lot been happening in Rails Edge and it just made sense to catch up with these things a bit.

So I decided to invest the time to upgrade, do some fixes and cleanup and generally bring my blog setup in a better shape again. If you’re running Mephisto and consider an upgrade, some of the following observations and notes might be of interest for you.

This article is part of the series “Get on Rails with Globalize!” and like the two last installments it’s a catch-all list: this time we’re going to point out some unexpected behaviours, problems and other funny things. Nothing world-shattering, just some things that you’ll probably want to be informed about so you don’t run into any problems.

• I’m seeing lot’s of strange characters!
• Weird Currency parsing results
• Globalize WrongLanguageError on attribute read
• Globalizes screws my RJS (or: my IE6)!

I’ll edit and complete this list as needed. If you’ve found any other common gotchas concerning Globalize, please drop me a note!

This article is part of the series “Get on Rails with Globalize!” and like the last installment it’s a catch-all list: this time we’re going to get some really cool extensions, plugins and patches caught. Stuff that makes Globalize an even mightier tool by adding useful functionality or connecting it to other important tools:

• Multilingual URLs
• Get Globalize working with :include and no base language
• Translate your application while browsing it
• Localized, concise Rails URL helpers
• Get Liquid templates to play nice with Globalize
• Globalize time_ago_in_words method of Rails
• Multiple arguments to fetch

I’ll edit and complete this list as needed. If you know of a Globalize extension, a library, plugin or patch that you found useful and that would fit into this collection, please drop me a note!

This article is part of the series “Get on Rails with Globalize!” and it’s a bit of a catch all list of useful techniques, tips and tricks. Stuff that you probably don’t necessarily need in every project but that you should be aware of:

• Bridge Globalize and TZInfo
• Preload View Translations in Production
• Clear Globalize’s translations runtime cache
• Use nice predicated block helpers in your views
• Organize your translations through Globalize’s namespaces
• Alternative Storage Mechanism for Model Translations

I’ll edit and complete this list as needed. If you know of a tip or trick that you found handy and that would fit into this collection, please drop me a note!

Originally triggered by Jeremy Hubert I’ve posted some thoughts about more concise and transparently localized Rails url_helper methods last month.

Basically Jeremy nailed a problem that occurs as soon as you define a Rails route that includes the locale as the leftmost parameter: you now can’t use Rails’ url_helper methods in a reasonable DRY way any more! A reasonable solution was pending.

Plugins to the rescue. By the end of this article you’ll be able to choose between two different solutions to this problem.

I promised to keep you posted with the results of my experimental ”outer spam floodgate” Mephisto extension. Tell you what. I’m super-happy with the results as I haven’t seen any blog spam this month! Yes, right. No spam.

I recently showed a Rails plugin that allows to transparently bundle your various CSS and Javascript resources (“assets” in Rails talk) into just one single CSS and Javascript file respectively.

I received some quite positive feedback on it and from various discussions some improvements have emerged that are now available in the repository.

Thanks go especially to Witold Rugowski who pointed me to the execution times of the Ruby implementation of JSMin with larger Javascript bundles. He also found a small bug in Uladzislau Latynski’s otherwise flawless JSMin implementation in Ruby that we are using by default.

Update: It’s worth noting that the following information has been updated in the follow-up article: Concise, localized Rails URL helpers? Solved (twice).

Recently Jeremy Hubert commented on my tutorial about routes setup for Globalize. In short he criticized that Globalize doesn’t provide a solution for transparently adding the locale to Rails url_helpers where needed. Instead of being able to say:

article_url(@article)   

You have to specify the locale for each and every call to an url_helper, like so:

article_url(@current_locale, @article)  

Needless to say that this does raise some eyebrows in the Rails community. So let’s see if we can come up with an acceptable solution here. This post describes some intermediary results.