When I made the gem for generating column widths last week, it was so I could avoid having to litter my code with divs to center the columns if my database contained fewer columns of data than would fill the screen width. So, of course, this week, I’ve made a gem so I don’t have […]
A view helper is a little piece of reusable code that you can place into your views to reduce the amount of code you have to repeat. You’ve probably already used some, such as form helpers (form_for) or others (image_tag). It’s also possible to make your own. If there’s something you do over, and over […]
I just published my first ruby “gem.” It’s a “gemified” version of the column width generator module, now available on rubygems.org: https://rubygems.org/gems/generate-column-widths And here’s the github page: https://github.com/liantics/generate-column-widths A ruby gem is a kind of plugin for ruby apps. You post your gem to a hosting site from which others can get the code, plug […]
Yesterday, I added the ability for admins to view, create, and edit categories. This meant I needed to display columns of categories, organized by category type (think of it as meta-categories) – just what I had done on the home page, but without the extra column to deal with. The code I’d written to generate […]
It’s been a while since we were shown how to create a module. This site was *very* helpful – clear, concise, easy to follow: http://www.benfranklinlabs.com/where-to-put-rails-modules
Well that was fun! Today’s task was to programmatically generate a set of columns of projects. Easy! Then I decided that if a column didn’t have any projects in it, it shouldn’t display. OK, that took a little more work. BUT that meant that the remaining columns would shift left, because of the way the […]
Great night at WWC Hack Night at Vista Higher Learning this evening! I got to meet a very enthusiastic young woman, and chat a bit about the project she’s involved with – the one that got her interested in learning to program. It was great fun to experience so much enthusiasm. I spent a bit […]
I had a fantastic opportunity to spend the day at Constant Contact in Waltham, where they hosted the Engineers4Engineers Conference. I’ve been to a number of conferences over the years, and generally, the presentations are somewhat hit-or-miss. This one was all “hits.” I’m really glad I got the chance to go, even though it meant […]
Insulating your basement, while a bit lower down on the ladder of efficiency measure effectiveness, is still something to consider if you live in a cold climate and the basement is used as a living space. http://www.nesea.org/uncategorized/heat-loss-to-the-ground-part-2/ Let’s assume the temperature below the slab is 50˚F and the average temperature against the foundation wall is […]
