I was writing a small Rails app for work to allow faculty and students to sign up for various events. So I had a Signup model :has_many timeslots that :has_many people. I needed to retrieve the email addresses for people that had signed up for timeslots after a certain time (i.e. all the people that had registered for a timeslot after Saturday at 10:00). Since the timeslots may not be in chronological order, I couldn’t find timeslots by a timeslot id.

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mod rails was released recently (I submitted a voice sample to narrate the demo screencast, but they went with the über-helpful Ryan Bates), giving hope to not-big-enough-to-require-a-dedicated-server Rails developers everywhere. Deployment has long been the biggest complaint against Rails, and hopefully this gem will facilitate getting Rails apps up and running on servers everywhere.

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I caught this one a little too late, but thought it deserved some pub. After being exposed to the .NET world for the last few months at my new job, I, too, have come to appreciate some of the niceties that the .NET framework provides. Fortunately I’m not the only one who notices this shortcoming, and a Rails plugin has been developed to give it .NET functionality. The short description is definitely worth reading.

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I inherited a hideous stylesheet and was trying to determine which styles were unused. I was about to write a Ruby script or something to go through all the pages in the site and find which styles weren’t used in any of the pages. Fortunately, someone already came across this problem. The Dust-Me Selectors Plugin for Firefox will do this for you. It lets you surf to as many pages in a site as you want to check on or it will read Google sitemap files and do the work for you.

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