Blog

Upgrading to RSpec 2 with Ruby on Rails 3

Jonathon Horsman Oct 15 2 comments

Following on from my previous post about upgrading our Rails 2.3.5 application to Rails 3 the most time consuming part was getting our 600 tests passing again.

Here’s the process I followed to get our recently upgraded Rails 3 app working with Rspec 2.

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Upgrading our RoR app to Rails 3

Jonathon Horsman Oct 14 1 comment

David Heinemeier Hansson finally got to me, plus I wanted to use a gem which only works on Rails 3. So I decided to take the plunge and upgrade our flagship Matchbook application to the newest Rails version.

Plus it’s been out for about 7 minutes now so it must be stable, right?? What are we waiting for? Let’s get on board!

Here’s my experience with the upgrade process, the problems I had and solutions I found, which will hopefully assist someone else too.

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undefined local variable or method integrate_views Rspec Rails

Jonathon Horsman Oct 13 0 comments

So you just Just upgraded to Rails 3 and Rspec 2? And now when you try and run your tests you get this error:

undefined local variable or method `integrate_views’

That’s an easy one.

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Advantages of mocking frameworks for testing Ruby on Rails

Jonathon Horsman Oct 01 0 comments

When I started out writing tests for my Rails projects I never really saw the point of a mocking framework.

After all Factory Girl made it so easy to just populate the database with the all the test data I needed, so why fiddle around with setting up expectations?

However I’ve discover an additional benefit to using a mocking over just speeding up my tests.

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10 reasons why we hate flash on the web

Jonathon Horsman Sep 07 6 comments

Tags:
Web Design

Adobe Flash allows web designers to create animations on web pages. These are sometimes effective and engaging and provide a level of interaction which cannot otherwise be achieved.

However most of the time it’s bad, lazy designers who don’t know any better.

Here’s our list of 10 reasons we hate Flash (and you should too).

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How twifficiency became a Twitter sensation in 24 hours

Jonathon Horsman Aug 19 1 comment

Tags:
Social Media

Twifficency is an interesting lesson in how to succeed in social media by combining the right ingredients which appeal human nature.

Ironically that wasn’t the intention at all, and when its 17 year old creator went to bed on Monday night he had no inkling of the looming storm which he would awake to the next morning.

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10 easy search engine optimisation tips

Jonathon Horsman Aug 10 1 comment

Tags:
Web Design

Search engine optimisation consultants can be expensive, and many of them do a terrible job.

With a little web coding knowledge (i.e. basic HTML) you can achieve 90% of the benefit of their search engine optimisation advice for free.

Follow these ten easy steps and tell me if you don’t see an improvement within a week.

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Download you twitter feed using Ruby on Rails with OAuth

Jonathon Horsman Sep 15 8 comments

Twitter provides an easy to use API allowing you to display your tweets on another web site or inside another application.

Here is a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to modify your Ruby on Rails application to download tweets using the new OAuth authentication mechanism.

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How to track and sort your website inquries

Jonathon Horsman Aug 03 0 comments

How to better manage your customer inquiries on your website.

If you’re receiving emails from your website when someone fills in a form and then copying them into Excel then you’re doing it wrong!

There’s a much better way and I guarantee you will be surprised how little it will cost.

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Launch of our new Matchbook application with big name clients

Jonathon Horsman Jul 27 0 comments

We’re proud as punch as the culmination of several months work has resulted in a slick, fast and very effective product.

Matchbook has launched and is ready to take on new clients to join the already very impressed and satisfied clients currently using it.

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