Running background jobs in an app is a great way to keep the UI snappy. Being it sending an email, calling some API, or any long running task, there’s always something that can be moved to the background. Sometimes, it makes sense…
Continue Reading…In this tutorial I will show you the setup and use of a email-preview gem called Letter-Opener by Ryan Bates. In case you are serious about using Rails and you do not know Ryan’s excellent Railscasts, go watch them. The gem we…
Continue Reading…Thinking Sphinx is now a very standard library for interfacing with Sphinx and has come a long way in its implementation of various features of Sphinx. The new version, 3.0, is a major rewrite and quite a departure especially in terms of…
Continue Reading…At the recent Summit Awesome Hackathon in Manchester, my team were working on a web app that updated a user’s bio on various social networks in one place. This meant getting down and dirty with various social network APIs (not a pretty…
Continue Reading…In the past two years I’ve heard a lot about new marketing techniques, and how they can be applied in web development. One of the most well known techniques these days is gamification. This article explains what gamification is and how you…
Continue Reading…This is the third installment in my series about Ruby Social Media Gems. Today, I am focusing on Facebook gems. Koala Gem Koala is a gem that interfaces with the various Facebook APIs (Graph API, REST API, Realtime updates, Test users, and…
Continue Reading…To give them their Sunday name, Finite State Machines (FSMs) are all around us and if we open our eyes long enough you can see them in play when you buy a can of soda, progress through e-commerce shopping carts, pass through…
Continue Reading…All of us write code on a regular basis, some more often than others. But there is a major deficiency in the amount of time we spend reading others’ code. Authors don’t produce good work unless they consider the work of the…
Continue Reading…In the previous part of this series, we’ve covered the LinkedIn gem and created a simple application that covered authentication and APIs queries. We are going to build a similar application with the Twitter gem for the same purposes. The Twitter gem,…
Continue Reading…Introduction to the Ruby Social Gems series In this series, we are going to cover gems based around social media and social media services, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and any other suggested gems. LinkedIn Gem The first gem in the…
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