http://www.echographia.com/blog making things better, making better things Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:52:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm building an app in Sinatra and testing it (in part) with Cucumber. When exceptions were raised in my application, I'd get a stack trace wrapped in pages and pages of HTML - very nice when you're testing in a browser, but almost impossible to work with in a command-line ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2010/04/19/sane-sinatra-stack-traces-in-cucumber/ Just kidding, mostly. I got email today informing me that Watchr "has been released successfully in Brothersoft". Congratulations! Watchr is a tiny program I wrote five years ago. Ken and I were talking about how we'd like something that pops up images when they're posted to Flickr. For reasons I don't ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2010/03/08/release-announcement-flickr-watchr/ Ruby-based testing will only get you so far in the web development world - sooner or later you need to make sure your code works in a real browser. So for the last few years I've been occasionally trying to get a browser-based test automation tool running - often something ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/12/23/setting-up-browser-automation-with-firewatir/ John Resig, of jQuery and other fame, spoke tonight at the BayJax meetup in the Yahoo! cafeteria. His slides are probably online somewhere, but they are lucid, informative, illustrated with pictures and code samples, and written by someone who knows what he's talking about, not to mention who was paying ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/12/11/john-resig-on-javascript-testing-performance-analysis-and-jquery-14/ You know those times when you're looking all over the house for something and then somebody says, "Is that it in your other hand?" Last night I spent at least an hour trying to figure out why I was getting a nil.rewrite error from Rails's url_for method. I've seen hard-to-debug errors ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/10/31/sometimes-im-not-smart/ A useful testing method in Rails is assert_select. In a functional test, you can use it to make sure the controller's response has the HTML you expect: should "display the suggestion as a link" do assert_select 'a[href=?]', @click_url, @display_url end ... says there should be an <a> tag with the given href ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/08/22/assert_select-from-arbitrary-text/ This weekend RailsBridge ran its first Rails BugMash: The idea is simple: RailsBridge has a lot of energy. The Rails Lighthouse has a lot of open tickets. With the help of some Rails Core team members, we're going to see what we can do to cut down the number of ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/08/10/bugmash/ The time had come to add a search engine to Touring Machine. I went pretty far down the road with Xapian/Xapit, but: You may want to trigger [reindexing] via a cron job on a recurring schedule (i.e. every day) to update the Xapian database. However it will only take effect after ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/06/27/deploying-thinking-sphinx-on-dreamhost-ps/ With the infrastructure in place for the suggestions feature, it's easy to add new kinds of suggestions - especially if someone else has already done most of the work. For example, given an address, we should be able to look up the names of businesses at that address, and suggest ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/06/12/where-its-at/ Here's how the suggestions feature for Touring Machine works so far. UI As the user enters data in the new venue form, if we're able to make any guesses, we pop them up in a panel to the right of the form. Each suggestion is a link. If a user clicks a suggestion ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/06/10/how-to-help/