Straw Dogs

The Tao of Ruby, Python, and….Straw Dogs?

Archive for December, 2007

Facebook API Wins API of the Year

December 29th, 2007

If you’ve never heard of Programmable Web then I suggest you take a look. Its a huge directory of all the major APIs on the web open for development. They’ve decided to award the Best API of the Year to the Facebook site. It won based on its openness, audience, money-making potential, viral features, modularity and metrics.

This got me thinking of ideas to put into a new Facebook app but before I jump in at the deep end I’m going to start small with a few quizzes that can plu gin to my existing sites then build from there.

Interesting side note for Ruby/Rails developers: There is an API interface for you to with rFacebook.

Failing that you could just get someone else to do it for you by getting one of the many Facebook Developers to do it for you.

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Posted in general, php, rails, ruby, web technologies

Tags: api facebook rails ruby

The :dependent option expects either :destroy, :delete_all, or :nullify

December 28th, 2007

For anyone else suffering this issue in their Rails app lately since the upgrade I’ve traced it to a deprecation in “acts_as_rateable” and “acts_as_taggable” which both use the value “true” for the dependent parameter instead of one of those listed.

The simple ‘hack’ to fix this is to replace “true” with “:destroy”. You’ll find the offending lines around here:

./vendor/plugins/acts_as_taggable/lib/acts_as_taggable.rb:17: has_many :taggings, :as => :taggable, :dependent => :destroy ./vendor/plugins/acts_as_rateable/lib/acts_as_rateable.rb:12: has_many :ratings, :as => :rateable, :dependent => :destroy

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Tags: ruby, rails, plugins

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Posted in rails, ruby

Tags: rails ruby

TextMate-like Vim Plugin

December 2nd, 2007

gVim Logo After the gushing praise I keep hearing about TextMate I installed a plugin for Vim which aims to give some of the benifits – though I’m yet to be convinced of its merits*.

Today when I was looking for extra bundles for the SnippetsEmu plugin (by far the most comprehensive) I came across a brand-new plugin by Taku Miyakawa called code-snippet. It’s not as mature or feature-rich as SnippetsEmu but as a newly released plugin its got a hell of a lot going for it. Here’s hoping it goes from strength-to-strength.