Simone Carletti's Blog » helperful

TabsOnRails and Helperful migrated to Gemcutter

Simone Carletti — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:07:03 +0000

Just in case you haven’t heard the news, Github discontinued support for building gems. Gem building has been disabled since the move to Rackspace and existing Gem will be available at gems.github.com for at least one year.

In the meanwhile, there’s an other Gem hosting solution silently gaining popularity: Gemcutter. Gemcutter aims to be a Gem hosting alternative to RubyForge. I never really liked the GitHub Gem system: altering the original Gem name with my login was a quick workaround for name clashes but causes a lot of confusion when trying to install the original version of a Gem or upgrading a Gem from multiple sources. But GitHub was effectively the most simple (and the unique) alternative to distribute a Ruby library as a Gem without creating a full RubyForge project and, most of all, it worked.

Now that GitHub Gem system is gone, I gave a look at Gemcutter and I eventually decided to move there my Helperful and TabsOnRails Gems.

Helperful 0.5.2 and TabsOnRails 0.8.2 are now available. The source code for both libraries is still hosted on GitHub here and here. The documentation has been updated accordingly.

The main benefit of using GemCutter is that you no longer need to pass the :lib option when declaring a Gem dependency in your Rails project.

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Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

# other configurations
# ...

config.gem "weppos-tabs_on_rails", :lib => "tabs_on_rails", :source => "http://gemcutter.org/"

end

is now simply

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Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

# other configurations
# ...

config.gem "tabs_on_rails", :source => "http://gemcutter.org/"

end

Thank you GitHub for taking care of my Gems and welcome Gemcutter.

Ruby on Rails and Canonical link tag

Simone Carletti — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:54:27 +0000

On February Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate URLs on sites. The element is called Canonical Link tag and the syntax is pretty simple.

This tag, added in the HEAD section of an HTML page, tells search engines that the preferred location for the content of the request page is the value of the href attribute, in this case http://example.com/page. If you want to learn more about the canonical link tag, have a look at Matt Cutt’s introductory post or Google Webmaster Central.

The new version of my Helperful Rails plugin provides a new method named canonical_link_tag, a super simple helper to generate the canonical link tag. The usage is similar to the auto_complete_link_tag helper.

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canonical_link_tag
# =>

canonical_link_tag(:action => "show")
# =>

canonical_link_tag("http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish")
# =>

You can install or upgrade Helperful via RubyGems.

1	$ gem install weppos-helperful --source http://gems.github.com

Helperful 0.3.0

Simone Carletti — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:46:34 +0000

Last week I released a new minor version of the Helperful GEM. This is essentially a bugfix release, although it comes with one minor new feature: the javascript_content_for tag. The following overview is taken directly from the documentation.

The javascript_content_for helper combines the features of content_for and javascript_tag into a single helper.

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<% javascript_content_for :head do %>
$("#id").hide();
<% end %>

The block is passed as it is to javascript_tag, then the result is stored as content_for :head.

Now you can call yield and output your javascript content.

1 2	<%= yield :head %>

This example is equal to the following statements.

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<% javascript_content_for :head do; javascript_tag do %> $("#id").hide(); <% end; end %>
<% javascript_content_for :head do %>

<% end %>

This feature also addresses an annoying bug in the has_content helper method caused by an undefined variable.

To install or upgrade:

1	gem install weppos-helperful --source http://gems.github.com

More features still to come. Visit the project page for further details.

Helperful: a large collection of Rails Helpers

Simone Carletti — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:28:19 +0000

Helperful aims to be a collection of useful and reusable Rails helpers.

Rails Installation

As a Gem

This is the preferred way to install Helperful and the best way if you want install a stable version.

1	$ gem install weppos-helperful --source http://gems.github.com"

You can specify the GEM dependency in your application environment.rb file:

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Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
# other configurations
# ...

config.gem "weppos-helperful", :lib => "helperful", :source => "http://gems.github.com"
end

As a Plugin

This is the preferred way if you want to live on the edge and install a development version.

1	$ script/plugin install git://github.com/weppos/helperful.git

Available Helpers

The list of available helpers actually includes AffiliationsHelper, ContentHelper and the more famous TitleHelper.

Affiliations Helper

Provides a set of helpers for working with online affiliations.

For example, the tradedoubler_verification_tag helper method returns the site verification tag required by Tradedoubler to verify the publisher account ownership.

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# In your template
<%= tradedoubler_verification_tag('00112233') %>

# Will produce the following output.

Content Helper

Provides a set of helpers for capturing and working with your page content in a more effective way.

Fo example, the has_content? helper is a natural fulfillment for the original content_for helper.

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<% content_for :foo do %>

This is a foo content.

<% end %>

<% has_content? :foo # => true %>
<% has_content? "foo" # => true %>

Title Helper

Provides an helper for managing page title in Rails views and layouts.

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# Include the helper in your controller.
# You might want to include it in ApplicationController to make it available
# always and everywhere in your templates.
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
helperful :title
end

# Now you can use set a title in your action
# Example. index.html.rb

<%= title 'This is a title' %>

# And print the title with a :site decorator in your layout.
<%= title :site => 'My Cool Site!' %>

<%= yield %>

Documentation and Repository

Visit the project page or the documentation for further details. The repository is available on GitHub for forking or reference. Feel free to add more helpers and send me a pull request. Please ensure new helpers come with an appropriate test suite.