Blocks rock and I couldn’t agree more. The functional programming aspect of ruby has started to interest me more and more. Blocks are used all over the place, with respond_to, collect, returning, and ActionView::Helpers::FormHelper#form_for.
Sometimes, a design requires a little extra markup, perhaps something to get that rounded corner to work or whathave you. Now let’s say this piece of code requires certain classes, a certain kind of structure, including a tile, and has to be used in many places, something like a sidebar piece. Instead of copying and pasting this structure over and over, you can use a helper to make you life easier, and if you combine it with a block, it will just feel even more painless.
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Well, I am about over it. This site was down for a good portion of the day yesterday, serving up “Application Error” messages. I have not touched my code in one bit or tweaked any setting, and the joker was down. I have even noticed it down when Google tries to index my site, as when I used their webmaster tools, I noticed the response errors
I was reading an article on shared hosting and Application Error and realized that Dreamhost may not be the answer I need.
So what is the answer? Right now, I don’t know. But the comments in the aforementioned article did make suggestions to Rails Playground, Planet Argon, and others. I suppose I will bit the bullet and look towards those services, once I have time after theInspirit gets through alpha.
gotAPI is a nice little resource for searchable documentation for some common programming languages and libraries, like PHP, Ruby, CSS, JavaScript, Protoype and the like. The site does not host the documentation itself, but rather provides an interface to find things on other pages.
What makes this service interesting is that users can help support what gets put on the site. To contribute to their API, you create a simple XML file which lists out all of the classes, properties, members and links to where those elements live.
For a project that I am working on, I required the use of RMagick and then i explored their documentation. The Image class has methods spread across three different pages. So I created the XML document with some curling, awking and other scripting fun and posted it to gotAPI. It was fairly easy and I can find things a little easier now using this site.
I got this tip from Jerry Jackson who told me about storing all of my configuration files, like .bash_profile or .vimrc, in an etc directory inside of my home directory. Once the files are in that directory, you could create a subversion repository; and inside of this repository, put the etc directory in that. Once the files are in a repository, you can check out that repository on any machine. Now you have a way to keep all of your config files easily in sync.
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