Ruby-on-Rails on Yang's Blog

MongoDB Query Performance Gotchas

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 17:23:38 +0000

User-friendly 500 and 404 pages on Rails 3

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 04:07:32 +0000

Simple Ruby on Rails app using Twilio API

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:19:22 +0000

Facebook Connect with Rails (using Omniauth and Devise) [Update]

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:47:05 +0000

Fresh installation of Ruby, Rails, Git, RubyGems, and Postgresql 8.x

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:53:34 +0000

Full text search on Heroku

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:44:37 +0000

How to convert from MySQL to Postgres

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:55:21 +0000

I have been using MySQL for probably as long as I could remember. For Bloglation, search capability is an important feature since it’s hard to browse each post one by one. I will probably implement tagging functionality, but even so, it’s important to be able to search the contents with a keyword(s). While Ultrasphinx works well, Heroku only supports WebSolr… I was using acts_as_ferret using /tmp for index files, but the problem using the /tmp directory is that ferret index files most likely to disappear at some point.

Then, I found out that Postgres supports full-text search and since Heroku uses Postgres, I could use other plug-ins like acts_as_tsearch or texticle for free. Free is important to me, since it’s not making any money.

Searching online, there are various ways to do it like Pivotal Labs’ script or Heroku’s Taps gem, but I wanted to do it in an old way like AEdifice to check everything is going alright at each step. 1. First thing to do is to backup MySQL

For me, it was important to backup preserving encoding, since it had many different languages. First I pulled db from Heroku thinking that I

To mock or stub 'open' method

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:17:01 +0000

Bloglation - Translate, Save, and Share!

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:44:29 +0000

Installing acts_as_ferret with pagination and deploying on Heroku

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:56:02 +0000

OMG!

This shouldn’t have been this difficult, but it has because while there are many cool tutorials are out there, they are mostly outdated, and for some reason, the instruction on Heroku was not accessible.

While I picked acts_as_ferret because Heroku supports it, many seemed to prefer Thinking Sphinx. So, if you are not constrained (like me with Heroku), you should try that out too.

1. Install acts_as_ferret

Full instruction is outlined on github, so you should check it out. You can also find the installation instruction and complete list of methods here, too.

While the instruction asks you to put version name, since Heroku only has version 0.4.3 installed, specifying a version will break it.

Counting rows and modifying MySQL to work with Postgres or Heroku

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:48:03 +0000

Now I am moving on to Open Translation Project. I’ve done some translation work before, including one of Paul Graham’s essay - Why to not not start a startup. BTW, he finally made a link from the essay to my translation. I used Google Translate as base, but I couldn’t believe how bad the translation was. Yahoo’s Babel Fish was a little better, but not as much. That’s where I got the idea of creating this possibly massive project.

Anyhow, I wanted to find a way of selecting an article or blog that was translated the most. I had one model that stored basic information of original article/blog. Then its children are translations. So, I need to count rows of children with the same parent. In MySQL, I had the following statement in Rails.

@top_origs = OrigPost.find(:all,
                              :select => 'orig_posts.*, count(posts.id) as post_count',
                              :joins => 'left outer join posts on posts.orig_post_id = orig_posts.id',
                              :group => 'orig_posts.id',
                              :order => 'post_count DESC',
                              :limit => 5)

Featured on Clickpass blog

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:30:50 +0000

How to integrate Clickpass (and OpenID) with a Rails app

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:21:20 +0000

I saw Clickpass in action at the Hacker News, and I thought it was another great way to reduce another login account. I wanted to implement it for my Open Translation project.

However, when I tried to find tutorials for using Clickpass with a Rails app, I couldn’t find any! How could it be! The pesudo code example Clickpass provided was for Java, I think, and thus it wasn’t any help to me. I was completely lost.

Then I realized that in the core underlying architecture of Clickpass is OpenID. Then it all made sense to me. I found a great tutorial on OpenID and Authlogic on a Railscasts episode (I am not using Authlogic for my site, though, but for the Open Translation project, I probably will.). So the following is a mixture of the Railscasts episode, ruby-openid gem, open_id_authentication plugin and Clickpass setup.

1. Install the gem and the plugin.

sudo gem install ruby-openid

How to integrate Facebook Feed with a Rails app

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:17:28 +0000

On Monday, I’ve gotten Facebook Feed publishing to work with my site, and it took about two hours including TV watching time. I could’ve done it faster if I actually paid a full attention. It was all possible, thanks to Chris Schmitt, who has an excellent tutorial on his site.

1. Simply you first need to create a sub-class inherited from Facebooker::Rails::Publisher inside a controller. In my case, I wanted to publish a feed when a new playground is added and an existing playground is edited, so it made a sense to put it in playgrounds controller. publish_pg takes objects and sets parameters, and publish_pg_template creates a feed message based on those parameters.

class PlaygroundsController < ApplicationController

[SNIP - other actions]

 class FacebookPublisher < Facebooker::Rails::Publisher

 def publish_pg_template
 one_line_story_template "{*actor*} created/updated: {*pg_name*}"
 short_story_template "{*actor*} created/updated: {*pg_name*} in {*pg_city*}, {*pg_state*}",
 "Check out what {*actor*} said, and rate or add comments to help other parents!"
 end

 def publish_pg(pg, facebook_session)
 send_as :user_action
 from facebook_session.user
 data :actor => facebook_session.user.first_name, :pg_name => pg.name, :pg_city => pg.city, :pg_state => pg.state, :pg_id => pg.id
 end

 end

end

Deploying a Rails app on Heroku (paperclip, gems, yml)

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:57:21 +0000

I just moved my PlaygroundsRUs site from AWS to Heroku, and I couldn’t be happier. My first full month bill from Amazon was about $75, and $74 of that (99% of the total cost) was for running an instance. Harlan told me about Heroku after he deployed his ForkThis demo on there.

Most of the transition was smooth, but there were a few hiccups on the way. One of them still hasn’t been resolved (one of the plugins is having conflict with PostgresSQL, which is used by Heroku). I will enumerate what I had to go through so that it might be easier for you.

1. Secret YAML files

I have a public GitHub account for deploying on AWS using ec2onrails. Since it’s public and anyone can see it, I had to omit sensitive .yml files in config directory that contained passwords and keys. It’s easily done by specifying those files in .gitignore and listing them in :nonvc_configs in config/deploy.rb used by ec2onrails.

I found out that for Heroku, the same can be achieved by creating another branch, including those files, merging with master, and pushing it to Heroku. So, the following lines should do the trick.

git checkout production
[remove those yml files from .gitignore]
git merge master
git push heroku production:master

How to integrate Google Maps in a Rails app

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:08:28 +0000

The major part of my experiment was going to be the integration with Google Maps. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about it, but Ruby on Rails being a community oriented language, I found a couple of quite useful plug-ins. With them, finding a location based on address or geocode or finding nearby places based on certain radius of a location were not too hard.

There is actually an excellent book also, called Beginning Google maps applications with Rails and Ajax. But the problem with the book is that it was geared towards more for java developers using rails. Thus, its major functions were javascripts and it showed how to talk to rails app. In my case, since I wanted simple features and I didn’t want to take time to learn javascript, I decided to find a simpler way.

And I found that for things I wanted to do, I could do with YM4R/GM and Geokit. There are other excellent tutorials out there like the one by Jason Gilmore on Developer.com.

Let’s begin.

1. Sign-up for Google Maps API by going to here. For development environment, you can use either http://localhost:3000 or http://127.0.0.1:300 as the website URL. Copy the API key.

When you move to production environment, make sure you come back here to get another key for production URL.

Singleton Class, acts_as_rated and twitterify in Rails

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:14:06 +0000

Today, I went to San Jose Ruby Hackfest meetup, and met a bunch of cool guys. One of them was Noah Gibbs, who helped me tremendously with one of the most pesky problems I had.

Before you go on, you might want to read up on really good tutorials on Singleton Class and Self variable.

How to integrate Facebook Connect with a Rails app

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:36:59 +0000

Update: I have written up another post for using Devise and Omniauth, and you can find it here. Facebooker is no longer maintained.

Top of my to-do list was to integrate Facebook Connect with my Rails app, since 1) there are A LOT of people using Facebook and 2) having to register to post or edit could be an obstacle in getting more users to use my site.

I looked on the web for a while, and found a great example by Stuart Eccles at Made by Many. It’s an awesome tutorial, but it’s for restful_authentication. I don’t use it, so I had to modify it a little bit. Also, I added a step to ask a user to pick a username. So the following instruction is basically modification of Stuart’s.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

1. Setup Facebook Application page

1.1. Go to this page, and enter a name for your application. I named mine “Playgrounds_R_Us”.

1.2. Make a note of Application ID, API Key, and Secret. You need it for facebooker.yml later.

1.3. Next is Authentication section. Here what’s important is Post-Authroize and Post-Remove Callback URL. They refer to a web page a user will be taken to after logging into and logging out of Facebook account. While testing, I left it at “http://127.0.0.1:3000”.

1.4. I also used the same URL (http://127.0.0.1:3000) for Canvas Callback URL in Canvas section and Connect URL in Connect section.

1.5. Then you are pretty much set with configuration on Facebook side.

2. Get facebooker plugin and install it. From your rails app root directory,

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/mmangino/facebooker.git

Alpha version of Playgrounds R Us is launched

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:10:35 +0000