Jon's Blog

Hubbub Are Hiring

2012-02-16T00:00:00Z

Since the middle of last year I’ve been working full time for Hubbub, a company which is supporting local independent food shops by providing home delivery services, allowing customers to buy great food even if they’re not able to get to the shops during the day. I’ve been having a fabulous time, they’ve got a great team, and I’ve learnt more about food in the last 6 months then I ever knew before starting!

We’re expanding now, and to do so we need another developer. That’s where you come in. If you want to work for a startup which is actually changing things that matter, instead of letting you share pictures of kittens in a slightly different way, we want to talk to you.

The full job description can be found on our website, but here’s the bullet points:

Our platform is built with Rails, running on Linux servers.
You’ll be working on the whole stack, from servers to CSS.
We’re looking for a problem solver, not just a coder.
Flexible working is an option. I work 4 days a week, 3 of which are from home.
Perks include free lunch when you’re in the office, and discounted food.

If that lot interests you, send an email to info@hubbub.co.uk with the subject line “Web Developer” letting us know why you want to work for us, and why we should want to work with you.

Uploading a file to S3 using Alfred

2011-05-21T00:00:00Z

I use S3 to share files temporarily for people, largely because it’s quick and simple when using a tool like s3cmd, close enough to free for the cost not to matter.

I also use Alfred to provide a GUI command line for Mac OS.

Thanks to Alfred’s ability to add shell commands as an action to be taken on files, its now possible for me to upload a file directly to my sharing bucket on S3, and copy the URL for it to the clipboard.

To do so, start by installing s3cmd. If you’re using Homebrew it’s a brew install s3cmd away. Otherwise, you’ll have to work it out yourself. Now run s3cmd --configure in a shell to set it up for your account.

Once that’s done, open up Alfred’s preferences, select the “Features” tab, and then “Terminal / Shell” from the list on the left.

In the shortcuts list hit the + button, and fill in the details, I’m using these:

Title: Upload to S3
Description: Uploads a file publicly to S3 and copies it's URL to dte clipboard.
Keyword: s3
Command: s3cmd put -P {query} s3://$SHARING_BUCKET | grep "Public URL" | ruby -e 'print SddIN.read.split(": ").last.strip' | pbcopy

Make sure to either set the SHARING_BUCKET environment variable in your profile, or replace $SHARING_BUCKET with the actual bucket name.

Save that, and then tick the “Silent” and “Action” boxes so that it doesn’t pop up a terminal window everytime.

Now you should be able to search for a file in Alfred, hit the right arrow, and enter “s3” to upload it. The URL will be in your clipboard.

Logging to Syslog from the command line

2011-05-10T00:00:00Z

Whilst reading about Heroku’s logging on Adam’s blog I came across logger, a tool available on most unix systems which takes any input on STDIN, and redirects it to syslog with the provided options. I’d never heard of it, so I assume there’s some other people who havn’t either, and are doing as I have in the past and messing around with far more convaluted ways of getting output routed to syslog.

The gist of it is:

echo "This will be logged" | logger -i -p local0.notice -t EXAMPLE

Which results in the following line in /var/log/syslog on my machine:

May 10 11:25:52 imac EXAMPLE[38038]: This will be logged

See man logger for full details.

Noumenon. A Ruby based CMS focused on the content.

2011-04-20T00:00:00Z

I’ve been doing some more Open Sourcery for the last few days, and I think it’s just about at a point where I’m happy writing about it now.

Noumenon is a content management system which tries to focus on the content, rather then it’s presentation. Currently it’s roughly equivalent to Jekyll or Toto, but without the blogging focus (although you could probably build a blog with it).

At the moment the key features that makes this different from every other Ruby based CMS are:

A focus on splitting content and it’s presentation

Content comes in the form of a YAML file, which is then transformed by templates within the site’s theme. Each template can specify which fields it supports, and which ones are required, with an error being thrown if the content you’ve written doesn’t provide all the required fields.

In the near future I’ll be providing an backend interface which can use the field metadata provided by a template to generate forms for creating and editing the content within your site.

Simple Themeing

Themes are distributed as Rubygems, and so can come from any source that Bundler supports. My hope is that this will lead to a decent ecosystem of themes being made available for the less design inclined to choose from.

Themes can provide any number of templates, although there will be a core set which will cover the majority of websites, if you’ve got something completely different, just create a new template for it.

Mountable Applications

If your site needs something more then just static content rendered by a template then you can specify points in the URL tree that a different application should be mounted. That can be any Rack compatiable application (up to and including a Rails application), but Noumenon is designed to make it easy to subclass it’s core and continue to make use of your theme’s templates.

Once the backend interface is in place mountable applications will also be able to hook into that to provide a way to manage them.

I’d love to hear what people think of this. I’m planning to use it for smaller websites that clients ask me to build, so I’ll continue building this even if no one else wants to use it, but my long term aim is for this to replace Wordpress as the publishing application people want to use.

Yeah, I know. Think small ;)

Text Tractor, a tool for editing copy.

2011-04-15T00:00:00Z

TLDR; I wrote an Open Source version of Copycopter’s server called Text Tractor. You can find it on GitHub at http://github.com/jellybob/text_tractor.

Update: I was asked by Thoughtbot to change the application’s name from it’s original one, so it’s called Text Tractor now.

The last couple of days I’ve been writing a Sinatra applications which I plan to use for managing copy on my client’s web applications. It’s not a full blown content management system, it’s just enough to allow clients to change the titles of pages and the like by themselves.

If you’re familiar with Thoughtbot then that might sound like something you’ve heard of before. If you’re not, you probably havn’t seen Copycopter, which is a tool with almost exactly that description, and a very neat client gem which synchronises your application’s translations with the Copycopter web interface.

When I tried it out I found that while I love the client, I was less then enamoured with the web interface, which I just couldn’t see most of my clients using… “What’s datetime.distance_in_words.about_x_hours.other, and why would I want to edit it?” they might say

I also wasn’t thrilled with the idea of paying them between $10 and $45 per month for the privilege of using it. Call me cheap if you like, but it just didn’t seem worth it.

Given that situation, and a couple of reasonably free days, I did what any self-respecting software developer would do.

I built some software that’s compatiable with Copycopter’s client gem, and I open sourced it. That may seem a little excessive to avoid paying a few pounds a month, but it did also give me the chance to try using Sinatra and Redis to build something larger then a toy project.

And now you can use it as well. You’ll find it on GitHub. It’ll run on Heroku, it’ll even run on Heroku for free if you don’t have that much data (and back it up, there’s no persistence guarantees on Redis to Go’s Nano plan). The web interface is a little rough around the edges still, but it does work, and it’s really quick thanks to PJAX.

Finally, I’d like to point that on the whole I’m a big fan of Thoughtbot’s work. I have paid accounts for both Hoptoad and App Trajectory, which I’m a big fan of. Copycopter I thought missed the mark though – the thought of going to a separate page for every translation in my application is horrifying to me.

Rails Wizard

2011-01-05T00:00:00Z

Given that my most popular post (by far) is about creating a new Rails 3 project with Mongoid and the assorted extras you always end up needing. It’s probably time I updated it slightly.

Ignore everything said in there, and instead use this process:

rails new APP_NAME -m http://railswizard.org/8ae846b8dc35319f5184.rb -T -O -J

Rails Wizard was probably the best application to come out of last year’s Rails Rumble. It allows you to use a simple interface to build templates for creating new Rails applications, and then add any extra commands you want to run to the end.

Activo Rails

2011-01-03T00:00:00Z

Since it was a bank holiday today I decided it was about time that I released a small project I’ve been working on for a while now. I’d had a couple of pull requests for it on GitHub already, and so I figured if other people were using and patching it, it was probably due for release.

I present to the world activo-rails. A Rails engine designed to make using Activo a more pleasurable process. I’ve been using the theme on a few projects recently, and decided I’d had enough of butchering the example page to get to a decent starting point.

The Big Features

View helpers for menus, breadcrumbs, and controls.
A customisable layout.
The FatCow icon set.

There’s more I’d like to add, but as a 1.0, I think this is probably enough.

Cucumber and Capybara Failures With Rails 3

2010-11-03T00:00:00Z

I just hit this problem where Capybara fails while running under Rails 3 with this error when trying to follow a link.

undefined local variable or method `node' for #<Capybara::Driver::RackTest::Node:object_id> (NameError)

According to the Jonas Nicklas the author, it’s solved by removing the line in features/support/env.rb which enables Javascript emulation, because that feature no longer exists in Capybara.

Comment out or delete this:

require 'cucumber/rails/capybara_javascript_emulation' # Lets you click links with onclick javascript handlers without using @culerity or @javascript

And all should be well.

A Change of Scenery

2010-10-28T00:00:00Z

You may have noticed that the look of my blog has changed (if not, you’re probably reading this via RSS, humour me and view it in a browser).

I started work on a new site a while ago, but I just came to the realisation that this blog will do the job just fine really, and transplanted the design to it this evening.

No doubt it will evolve, I might even test it in Internet Explorer at some point, but for now I’m actually quite happy with it.

Template Naming for ActionMailer 3

2010-10-14T00:00:00Z

When naming templates for ActionMailer 3 remember that the naming format has changed.

Templates used by in the form method.text.plain.erb and method.text.html.erb. They now take the form method.text.erb and method.html.erb.

This bit me with a lot of frustration, since it won’t automatically render the the old form. I only realised what was happening when I tried to manually render it and got a deprecation warning in the logs.