Latest Screencasts

Coders tend to like minimalist blogging engines. Give a developer something that processes a directory of markdown and textile files and they’re usually happy. In the Ruby world, we have LOTS of platforms for doing this: Jekyll is a popular platform that’s actually built into Github Toto was just announced...

Rack::Payment lets you add 5 lines of code to your Rails (or any Rack-based) application and you can start accepting single payments! Let’s say you have an online store and you want to accept credit card payments. You can require rack-payment in your application: 1 # config/environment.rb 2 3 Rails::Initializer.run...

At Dev Fu!, we started coding all of our new applications using DataMapper a few months back. For awhile, we were waiting for Rails 3 to be released (which has DataMapper support baked in), but we realized we were preventing ourselves from using a tool that we love (and prefer...

PHD gives you Passenger-based Heroku-like Deployment. Having been spoiled by Heroku for some time, I love being able to run 2 commands from a git repository to deploy an application: 1 $ heroku create my-app 2 $ git push heroku master If you have Passenger installed on a server, you...

I wanted to get started with Facebook development, so I made a little badge: Facebook Github Badge In this screencast, I walk through the basics of creating something similar. We … setup a Facebook application get it setup so we can test it (running on our local computer) render HTML...

So, back when all I needed to do with many Twitter apps was to authenticate against Twitter’s OAuth and that was it, I created and screencasted the original Rack::OAuth gem. After coding a few Twitter apps that needed more integration, and in response to feedback about the first gem, I’ve...

Rack::OAuth is a Rack middleware for easily integrating OAuth into your Ruby web applications. If you’re using a Sinatra application or Rackup file, all you need to do is: 1 use Rack::OAuth, :key => 'your-oauth-app-key', 2 :secret => 'your-oauth-app-secret', 3 :site => 'http://twitter-or-whatever.com' If you’re using Rails, all you need...

Tonight, at the Phoenix Android meeting, someone asked if I knew any good Ruby / Rails web hosts. Something easy for someone who’s just learning Rails and wants to be able to essentially copy/paste their code to a server and have it “just work.” The first (and only) service that...

Part 3 in my screencast mini-series on Rack … checkout parts 1 and 2: Part I: Rack Basics Part II: Rackup files, Rack::Request, Rack::Response, and more In Part 3, we cover: What is Rack middleware? How to write your own Rack middleware How to use your Rack middleware from any...

This is a follow up to my first Rack screencast, Rack Basics. In this screencast, we cover a bit more of the basics. Instead of playing around in an IRB shell, we create an executable Rack application using a Rackup file (the conventional way to run Rack applications). We use...