Rails Summer of Code, Week 4, July 15, 2010 from Cindy Royal on Vimeo.

This week I cover error handling in ruby (begin-rescue-end) and rails (logger and object.errors) I then move to talk about (Asynchronous Javascript) Ajax in general including common caveats,  I then talk about Ajax with rails 3.

First lets take a look into my approach, and then I’ll talk about my implementation.

Download Files View Demo

The Approach

The notifications use an animation to grab the users attention. For the animation I decided to use the jquery javascript library. It is very easy to use and has several pre-built animations such as fadeIn and fadeOut.

Once a user dismisses a notification they should never see it again. To remember when a user dismisses the notification, I decided to use http cookies.  These cookies allow us to save a value in the user’s browser, so when the user clicks dismiss they create a cookie on their local machine. Then the next time they visit the webpage, the page will see that they already have the cookie, and the notification will not be displayed.

Alternatively, if the webpage required a log-in, then I could have stored this data in a database and associated it with a user, but by utilizing cookies I can apply this technique to any web page without the need for any server side scripting (PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc.).

After looking into several ways to get and set cookies I decided to use the jquery cookies plugin which allowed me to dynamically set cookies without a page refresh.

Now that you know my approach to the problem lets take a look at the implementation.

The Implementation

For the fade in fade out animation I used Jquery. You can use the GoogleAPI copy of the library by placing this code in your webpage:

 <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Next I downloaded the jquery cookies plugin and included it in my webpage. To create a cookie named notificationBar and give it the value “closed” we can use the plugin and execute this command:

$.cookie('notificationBar', 'closed');

After we have created the notificationBar cookie we can get its value by executing this command:

$.cookie('notificationBar');

this command will now return the value “closed”.

Next I added the html for the notification that will be displayed:

<div id = "topannounce" class = "announce" style = "display:none;">
   This Is a Notification from <a href = "http://thinkbohemian.com" target = "_blank">ThinkBohemian</a>
    <a href = "#" onclick = "$.cookie('notificationBar', 'closed');
        $('#topannounce').fadeOut('slow')">X</a>
 </div>

By default it is hidden using:

style = "display:none;"

Using jquery we can fadeIn the notification unless the notificationBar cookie has been set to “closed“.  To accomplish this I added these lines of javascript to the page:

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(document).ready(function(){
   if ($.cookie('notificationBar') != 'closed') {
     $('#topannounce').fadeIn('slow');
   }
 });
 </script>

Then I styled my HTML with a little CSS, and the effect was complete. My webpage has its very own dismissible notification bar:  View the demo of the notification in action.

Richard Schneeman: @ThinkBohemian

I used this effect to notify visitors to  WhySpam.Me, my disposable email service,  about the launch of ShadyEmail.com, the fun way to hide your email and make it questionably suspicious.

–

Page Rank 0 to 4 in Four Months

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get feedback not only on the content that you submit, but on the way you submit it? Maybe your angle is all wrong, or you misspelled the title, or any number of things? It could be useful for veterans as well as noobs. Have an idea for a press release, or a submission to slashdot, but want to try a few different angles? You could experiment with posting different titles, and bodies and have users rank and give feedback, with the focus less on the content, and more on the presentation.

Then when content is ready they can post to social sites (reddit, buzz, fark, etc.) through our site, and we can track who gets the most diggs/upvotes/etc. So you can see from start to finish what worked and what didn’t. Think of it a s a social media sandbox, a place to pitch your ideas before you pitch to the world. What do you think?

Known Implementations:

• Limited feedback can already be gained from comments from the posting sites themselves, though they aren’t always helpful, and rarely focus on how to better present the submission.
• PR professionals, and other pay for marketing consultants
• Various forums http://groups.google.com/group/Interactive-PR?lnk=gschg&pli=1 online, though most are not very helpful, and are filled with spam and people only interested in self promotion

Biggest Hurdles:

• Link spam, and self promotion would dominate the site initially, unless enough incentives are given to users, maybe users above a certain rank will get their links posted without nofollow…
• Is the idea too specific or is it too general? Can others do achieve the same result with another service, or no service? How does one market to the marketing community?

Now, I don’t have a ton of money to hire full time developers, and I would prefer not to piecemeal out work to contractors. What I do have is plenty of real world experience in web developement and a little money. If I could go back in time and offer my college self a little bit of cash and an experienced developer’s time, I would have jumped on top of the opportunity. That’s exactly what I want to do with UT in Austin students interested in web development right now.

I envision seasoned developers willing to devote a few hours a week to be mentors to a small group of students (I’m thinking a one to three ratio). In exchange they would get a dedicated and agile team at a cut rate price. It would be a win-win symbiotic relationship, the mentors get some extra hands on their projects as well as management experience, and the students pick up real world programming and project skills as well as a little beer money. Mentors can certainly use this opportunity to network with other developers and entrepreneurs. They say the best way to find a good fit for a co-founder is to work with them, so why not work with them on a project together without spending a fortune.

This is still just an Idea, for now, but i think it could go places. If you’re interested in getting some extra help on your projects, or just want to make a difference let me know by filling out this google doc spreadsheet. If you have any constructive criticism, or good ideas please leave them in the comments.  I’m calling this idea a Geekternship though that may change if someone has a better title.

Signup to be a mentor

You may find after you’ve changed your permalinks that your articles now all get a 404 error. This is because your server thinks that your looking for a file in the /2010/01/29/national-instruments-extreme-video/ directory. So we need to let our server know not to do that. There are plenty of examples of how to do the re-write if you’re using apache, but if you’re an nginx fanboy like I am, there wasn’t very much information. So to make this happen we need to add a few extra lines under our nginx.conf under the location / { section like this:

       location / {
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^.*$ /index.php last;
         }
        }

Enjoy the pretty permalinks!!

Update:

So this:

reload!

Acts as if you just did this:

exit
script/console

So not only does it require one less command, but you can still use all previously defined variables. Awesome!

mate .gitignore

add the file you don’t want to show up in the public repository, such as config/environment.rb

Then you can call this command to force the branch to be filtered. Note this command will remove the actual file from your hard drive, so make sure to have a backup.

git filter-branch --force --tree-filter  'rm config/environment.rb' HEAD

You can then push your newly super secure repository.

git push --force origin master

Custom dynamic error pages in Ruby on Rails

Authlogic and rescue_from ActionController::RoutingError

Enjoy, and happy erroring!

http://github.com/thinkbohemian/Selenium-RC-Beta-2

Btw. if you’re just getting started testing and using cucumber, i highly recommend checking out RSpec. It takes a little longer to learn, but IMHO is more intuitive to develop with once you get going.