Years ago, when I first started coding in Rails, I wrote a blog post about handling titles and meta tags in a Rails app. While it was a good solution for the time, it is a woefully outdated approach for the world of Rails 5. Here is a better way.
Thin fonts are oh-so-cool nowadays. The thinner, the trendier. But browsers have their own ideas when it comes to rendering font thickness. How to make everyone play nice?
Here's a cool Rails validation trick to add to your arsenal. Enjoy.
In this last post of the Yodlee-Rails series, we put all the remaining pieces together and retrieve details bank and credit card transaction data for our users.
How to aggregate and group multiple columns within a single table for metric views.
In this post of the Yodlee-Rails series, we learn how to manage users on Yodlee. We also cover how to auto-create and destroy Yodlee users as users join and leave your app.
We continue the series by learning how to apply object-oriented principles to effectively and efficiently render login forms from hundreds of banks.
In this post, we look at interacting with banks and other services via the Yodlee API in preparation for scraping user credit card and bank statement data.
Yodlee is a service like no other: it allows apps to aggregate consumer data from across the financial spectrum. In this first post of the series, we begin creating a Yodlee Rails app using best practices.
On October 21st, Yodlee released a new REST/JSON API to replace its current SOAP/XML API. Here is a breakdown of the changes.
Occasionally an app is re-deployed but won't start. You open the log and you see 'Connecting to database specified by database.yml' being outputted. Here's how to fix that.
Chunk and Partition are two incredibly useful enumerators for grouping items. We'll explore them in this post, show an example of where they shine, and also look at some other grouping methods.
While Ruby's OAuth gems do go a long way towards making OAuth implementation with Rails a pain-free process, the standard method of implementation rapidly breaks down on a full scale production app when User validations and logic begin conflicting with the information we receive from OAuth.
In this tutorial, we will take an object-oriented approach, separating logic for OAuth users from logic for non-OAuth users to create a robust and stable OAuth implementation that is clean, sturdy, and will not break down as you add functionality to your app's user objects.
Note: This tutorial is intended for programmers who have implemented OAuth for Rails before and are looking for a better way to do so. It is not a beginner's tutorial. It assumes the reader already has knowledge of the OAuth gems and how to integrate them into a Rails app.
When are instance variables the right tool, and when are they not? What are the alternatives? And what does an overabundance of instance variables mean? Here are my thoughts on clean object modeling in Ruby.
Rails comes with built-in support for allowing a model to accept "nested attributes": where one resource can accept attributes for another (sub)resource. It works out of the box for when a form needs to support just one record of the nested resource. But what if a form needs to accept unlimited records of the nested resource?
Here is an easy jQuery-only solution for creating unlimited nested forms.
Ever had to pass command line arguments to Rake task? Here's the syntax.
If you are a Rails developer, it is only a matter of time until a client approaches you to build a multitenant SaaS app.
Multitenancy applications are unique in the respect that data between tenants needs to separated by a virtual iron wall. In this post I will discuss the three common solutions for creating multitenant apps in Rails, what I dislike about each one, and I'll propose a new implementation which is simpler, cleaner, and very effective.
Dubbed by CNN the "800-pound gorilla of the internet", Yodlee is used by banks and financial institutions worldwide to aggregate consumer data from across the financial spectrum: it gathers and collates everything from student and mortgage loans, to credit cards, 401(k), checking, and savings accounts.
The Yodlee API has become something of a hobby for us at NYC Dev Shop. In this tutorial, I will walk you through the process of setting up a working API connection between your Rails app and the Yodlee API service.
One of the best things about Rails is its powerful templating system which logically split the view into layouts, views, and partials, and makes creating great sites a snap. But this template approach makes it difficult to create dynamic <title> </title>
tags, as you can't easily alter your layout file from within a view.
In this tutorial, we explore an elegant way of rendering dynamic title tags and SEO meta tags on a page-by-page basis, while optionally allowing the tags to fall back on pre-defined defaults when left unspecified.