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…

AJAX requests are a grand thing. They let you request things from your server without refreshing the page. Now, if you are trying to proxy a page, you can rewrite all the links in the page to point back through your proxy, but AJAX requests are another thing. Oh wait no they're not! You can't rewrite them when you proxy the page (by proxy, I mean you request my page with a URL param to another page, and I pull in that page, do some stuff, and se…

Anybody who blogs about programming related topics needs to post code at times. When I was on Wordpress, I used the WP-CodeBox plugin. It worked quite well, but it was server side. This is fine if you intend to stay with your software forever, but when I moved off Wordpress to my custom solution, it became a problem. syntaxhighlighter syntaxhighlighter is a fairly popular solution, and for good reason. It is entirely javascript based so there is…

I guess I should probably read this again, since my web development world is expanding immensely. 8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make