Software Trenches

Textmate Footnotes

Textmate Footnotes is a Rails plugin created by "SyncPeople":http://syncpeople.com/downloads/syncpeople_on_rails_features

In development mode this plugin will change your Rails web pages to add links to page Controller and View files:
!/images/13.png!

If your project is using Subversion then the easiest way to install the plugin is via svn:externals:

 
svn propset svn:externals "textmate_footnotes \
  svn://syncid.textdriven.com/svn/opensource/textmate_footnotes/trunk" \
  vendor/plugins/
svn up

Configuring Rails project for Subversion

Rails makes it easy to start with a new project -- just type *rails projectname* and you are all set.

Adding the new project to subversion is another story... Nobody wants to have tmp and log files checked into a brand new svn tree. Until now I used to import the whole project into svn repository and then manually remove log files, and tmp (cache/session/socket) files. The final step was to do *svn propedit svn:ignore* in each directory to make sure these files are not added again.

There is a better solution -- install svn_conf generator:

gem install --source http://dist.agilewebsolutions.com/ svn_conf_generator

and then use

./script/generate svn_conf

to create a couple of rake tasks. For more details, see "Rails Wiki":http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/SVN+Conf+Generator

Reading List 2006

For independent software developers.

Very useful collection of CSS techniques.

I picked up this book after reading an article at "ThinkVitamin.com":http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-crap-is-your-site-design. Robin Williams clearly presents four important design rules: Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, and Contrast.

TextMate and Ruby/Rails Documentation

"Lars Pind describes":http://pinds.com/articles/2005/11/14/rails-accessing-rails-documentation-from-textmate how to add quick access to Rails documentation.