Nobody Listens Anyway » gem

River – Amazon Wishlist Gem

Justin Ball — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:01:43 +0000

One more post on Amazon Wishlist code. As another follow up to my post on Amazon Wishlist RSS, Ruby and Signing/Authenticating your Requests and the site I built to run the code My Amazon Feeds (post here) I've created a gem to contain all the code. Get it by running

  sudo gem install river

It's a pretty simple gem so working with the code is also pretty easy to do:

 
am = AmazonRequest.new(amazon_access_key_id, amazon_secret_access_key, ecs_to_rss_wishlist, amazon_associate_tag)
results = am.get_amazon_feeds(username) # username needs to be the user's Amazon email
feeds = results.collect { |result| OpenStruct.new(:url => result, :title => 'Amazon Wishlist', :name => 'wishlist') }

Get amazon_access_key_id and amazon_secret_access_key from your AWS console. The amazon_associate_tag parameter is optional. Throw it in there if you want your Amazon associate information in the feed. May as well .

The one parameter that might be confusing is 'ecs_to_rss_wishlist'. This value is a url where the xslt transform lives. This has to be a public url. I've included a version in the gem. To get it into your Rails application you'll need to add this to the Rakefile in the root of your app:

 
require 'river/tasks'

Then sync the file into your app:

rake river:sync

After that you'll find the file in the public directory and you'll be able to access it with something like http://www.example.com/ecs_to_rss_wishlist.xslt

Disguise your Rails Application

Justin Ball — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:30:44 +0000

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to theme my Ruby on Rails applications. Turns out after you build a piece of software people want to use it to do other stuff. Go figure.

I really like how simple it is to skin a Wordpress site so I ~~stole~~ borrowed some ideas.

From all of my research and effort and late night I give you disguise the ruby gem that makes it simple to skin your Rails application and impress everyone (ok maybe your mom).

Disguise makes it possible to generate a theme for your Rails website, set the current 'theme' using an admin interface or change the theme based on the current url.

Install the gem:

 
  sudo gem install disguise

or get the source code at:
http://github.com/jbasdf/disguise/tree/master

Babelphish – yml Translation Made Simple

Justin Ball — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:16:01 +0000

You've just finished version one of your most excellent, million dollar application. You've built it the right way. All of your application' strings live in the en.yml file neatly tucked into the locales directory patiently waiting for the day when you hit it big, go international and hire a ~~expensive~~ fancy firm to translate your application for the next big market.

Why wait? Impress your friends, your family, and the ladies right now. Today. In just seconds.

With Google Translate and some gem magic your application can now impress your investors in 41 languages. Win friends and influence people in just three simple steps:

sudo gem install ya2yaml

sudo gem install babelphish 

babelphish -y ./locales/en.yml -o

Viola! Your application now has a yml file for every language Google supports. -y gives the path to your source file. Feel free to start with other languages es.yml, jp.yml, etc all work just fine. -o means overwrite the files in the directory. If you have already paid someone a lot of money to translate your application I don't recommend using that option.

In case you think I suck as a programmer feel free to go fork it.

CMS Lite Gem

Justin Ball — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:54:40 +0000

A pretty common problem when developing a Rails application or any web application for that matter is how to deal with content. I've often run into situations where the content development team is familiar with html and can produce reasonable content + markup. Since you are going to go to all the effort and spend all the money search engine optimization (SEO) in the form of reasonable urls would be nice as well.

Enter CMS Lite.

I've just finished up a gem that makes it simple to keep the content out of the app directory and thus ensure your content developers don't have to worry about messing up code. (You can however use Ruby code in the content pages).

CMS Lite is a gem built specifically for a Rails application. You can find the code and instructions on usage here:
http://github.com/jbasdf/cms_lite/tree/master or install the gem:
sudo gem install jbasdf-cms-lite

I'm hoping to have a rubyforge project soon which will mean you will be able to install the gem this way:
sudo gem install cms-lite

Just give me a few days and I'll update the post when that happens.