Ubuntu and gVim

I've always been a Windows or DOS user ever since childhood. In the past several years I have tried to migrate to Linux.
Here comes in Ruby on Rails... on gVim... on... Ubuntu. It's nice and fast. you feel like you put your computer on steroids. Enough talk. Let me share with you the simple steps I took to install it.

1. Install Ruby on Rails so that gVim may be able to access whatever files are in the RoR install.
2. Go to http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~djm/ubuntu/gutsy/#gvim and follow the installation instructions for gVim.
3. Go back to my earlier post on Vim and you may follow that and paste the custom files in the gVim ~/.vim/ (which is equivalent to the Window's ~/vimfiles/ folder).

Happy geek out!

Running Multiple servers

Now this really isn't a hack for rails or a fix. Its a nice little thing built into rails that I just started using. Its running multiple rails programs on a localhost for testing.
Basically, the jist is you can run several RoR servers on the same computer as long as the ports are different.

To achieve this when you run a RoR server with the command :
ruby script/server
you can add a port option by adding -p and specifying the port number:
ruby script/server -p 3001

the default port is 3000, and you can't run multiple servers on a localhost without specifiying a port.

you can also use :Rserver -p 3001 if you are running it on Vim

Tackling VIM

Two posts ago I was talking about the RoR talk that Guy gave. Since then, I've learned how to use VIM. There is a bit of a learning curve but you'll see you'll start to work a lot faster about 2 days of continuous use (sleep is ok).

I've found T Pope's article to be very useful. Read that and all the links in the article and the preceding articles.

Stumbling into REST

I stumbled into REST accidentally about 1 month ago. Since then, I've learned to try (at least) to make the URLs more beautiful and this simplifying the sites that I create. Here are some resources I've found to be quite useful:

1) DHH's 2006 keynote
2) Episodes 35 and 67 of Railscasts

If anyone can add to this list, please drop a comment!

PhRUG Ruby on Rails Talk

I went to a RoR talk last night in Ortigas. It was sponsored by Exist. The speaker was Guy Naor, the CTO of Morph Labs. Because he mentioned a bunch of stuff that I need to remember, here's a list of things people and I should do or at least look into if they are into Ruby on Rails:

• Continuous Integration
• Capistrano and SVN
  
• The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton
• Test Driven Development
• Behaviour Driven Development
• Vim & Rails
• Know your regular expressions!
  

I've looked into these before but I didn't take that much importance to them. Now I know I should look into it some more!

You can't upload files via ajax alone!

Spent the morning figuring out something you can't do! I was trying to make an ajax file uploader but kept running into problems. I asked around #rubyonrails in freenode but got no answer so I did some searching... and found a thread of this person that tried to do the exact same thing.

helper: Toggler

I made a new helper to help out with toggling a div. To make sure the div is invisible upon load, make sure you add the style="display: none;" in the div.

To call the helper, use it like this:

<%= toggler("click me to open that div", "div-id") %>