I was doing some optimizing the other day on a Rails 2.3.x application with a metal controller. I didn't feel like writing a straight rack application, so I used sinatra. A pretty good explanation of how this works can be seen in Adam Wiggins' slides: Rails Metal, Rack, and Sinatra from Adam Wiggins In Rails 3, they still have metal controllers, in that the ActionController::Metal class is essentially a really thin controller, and you can use it…

Version 0.3.0 of sinatra-bundles is out and powering the blog for a week or so. It's cold out there, so bundle up: % gem install sinatra-bundles require 'sinatra/bundles' Version 0.3.0 has a new feature and a slight API change. Custom path prefixes Yeah, I know, not everybody is as awesome as I am with their stylesheets and javascript files in the stylesheets and javascripts directories, but now you can control where they live on the disk. docun…

I pushed up a new version of sinatra-bundles and it's running smoothly on my blog here, so I best tell you about it. First, get your bundle on: % gem install sinatra-bundles require 'sinatra/bundles' Version 0.2.0 has a couple fun things. The sinatra dependency is bumped up to 1.0, since it's out (yay!), it's more awesome, and I'm not quite sure if the bug that prevented me from using earlier sinatra was fixed or not in the 0.9.6 release. etag s…

Lots of interesting things are afoot, and I try to keep track of them. Here's what I'm watching. Rails 3 Lots of new changes are coming with Rails 3, and it's pretty exciting. I wrote about some of the cool ones here. Rails is shaping up to be faster, more modular, and generally better and easier to work with. With all the smart people working on it, you don't have to look very hard to realize this is going to be a big release, and is only going…

It occurred to me the other day, that I should take a look at the middleware I use on this blog. I don't know what it was. My spidey senses just tingled. Boy was I right. I totally had it backwards. Rack middleware is a fantastic thing. It's like a little encapsulated rack application that you can use to filter, process, or otherwise mess with responses. There is middleware to add etags, configure caching, catch and log exceptions, deal with coo…

Hopefully you didn't notice much, except the speed increase, but my blog is no longer on the behemoth that is Wordpress. While Wordpress served me well for quite some time on my other blog it always kind of bugged me. Well no more! I took a couple days (basically 2 full days and 2 evenings) and wrote my own little blogging engine from scratch. You can find it on github and get forking if you so choose. What I used: ruby and sinatra They are pret…

When the going gets tough, the tough mess with cookies! Well sort of. I started using Chromium from the Chromium Daily Build PPA yesterday at work. I remembered most of my passwords for things, but one eluded me. The wiki. The wiki system we use is WikkaWiki and while it does the job, it’s not something that would be my first choice. Or second choice. Anyway. The weird thing is, it does something stupid and as a result, Firefox can’t remember th…