There have been some intelligent and useful comments here over the last few months. Here are a few of them:

Autotest

I’d like to think that I’ve had a hand in making autotest more well known. I’ve overheard many conversations about autotest recently, and even showed it to a group of programmers at a restaurant during the Seattle.rb monthly meeting.

Father-of-Typo Tobi Lütke pointed out a related tool for Mac OS X called stakeout. It uses kernel-based notification so it can react as soon as a file is saved (instead of polling every five seconds). I’m using it for smaller situations where I need to watch one or more files and run a rake task when any of those files change.

topfunky$ stakeout "rake nuby:graphs:comments" file_to_watch.rb other_file_to_watch.rb

Half the benefit of autotest is the fact that one action (saving a file) fires two actions (the actual save and the running of tests). I would have to switch to the terminal and run rake, which would take 3-5 seconds. Then, I wait 10-15 seconds for Rails to be loaded into memory before the tests can be run. In that period of time, autotest has already started the process.

Eric Hodel is not one to rest with something half-done and has already declared that autotest sucks. He’ll be rewriting it to make it suck even less.

Rails Plugins

In Test Your Helpers, faithful reader Brad Garland asked about essential Rails plugins and where to find them.

I’ve used plugins a lot recently and am putting together a tutorial for this blog. My favorite sources for plugins are (in order):

• technoweenie’s plugins—Not only are they useful, but you will become a better programmer by reading Rick’s code. Some of the testing techniques in acts_as_authenticated have made their way into my standard test suite for any project I’m working on. I need to loot the init.rb from Rick’s gems plugin for my own topfunky_tasks.
• Rails Core plugins—Good stuff here, and more will be making its way here as features are weeded out of the core Rails framework. I’m using exception_notification as an easy way to get email when an app barfs out a 500 error.
• Rails Wiki—The authoritative list of plugins.
• Agile Web Development Plugin Directory—A new directory of plugins, from lives-in-Seattle-but-never-attends-Seattle-rb Ben Curtis.

And of course

• Topfunky plugins

I added a plugin-ized version of the enhanced calendar helper from Jeremy Voorhis. The second most popular click-out from Ruby on Rails Workshops is the Calendar Helper, so I figured that people would want an easy way to put a calendar into their app.

It also includes a calendar_styles generator that copies some stylesheets to your public directory. You can use them as-is or modify them for your own site.

Server Monitoring and Downtime

Several people mentioned other installed apps or hosted services for monitoring your server’s uptime:

• Serverwatcher—A desktop app
• Montastic—A free service, written in Rails
• Nagios—Robust monitoring program for many servers and many services

Transcriptions of the Rails Podcast

After reading some comments from my small contribution to the Carson Systems’ new Think Vitamin site, I decided to have the episodes of the Rails Podcast transcribed so those who can’t hear (or prefer to read) can enjoy the content. Michael Doornbos covered the bill for two episodes, and I’m looking for ongoing funding or other contributions for the rest. If you’d like to donate, use my donate button. It costs about US$14 per episode.

I’ll be putting together a separate RSS feed for transcripts, but here are the first two:

• David Heinemeier Hansson
• Robby Russell and Jeremy Voorhis

Seattle.rb Cash Horde

A few months ago I unwisely promised to donate any money from hosting referrals to the Seattle Ruby Brigade. A few weeks ago I checked the balance….fifteen hundred dollars!

Instead of buying myself a MacBook, I’m keeping my word. We’re still planning the details, but we hope to spread it out over the next year and fly in four or five master Rubyists to present at our monthly meetings. I’ll post a special podcast recording of each lecture.

So I take no responsibility for your experience, but I like the huge disk space, generous bandwidth, and cheap prices at Dreamhost. Use this link and US$97 will go to the Seattle Ruby Brigade:

http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?muchawi

Add the code TOPFUNKY50 and you’ll get US$50 off. The remainder (US$47) will go to the Seattle Ruby Brigade Ruby Fund for the Promotion of Ruby.