You don’t have to be a Dr. Nic with his 100+ public repos to appreciate the Github Fork Queue and how it streamlines accepting patches for your open source projects.
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Fork you? No, no, no – Fork Queue.
Twitter gem updates: So long Mash, hello Hashie
A couple of quick updates on the Twitter gem. Due to some conflicts with extlib, we’ve swapped out Mash in favor of Hashie. Michael’s blog post has the low down on the move. Thanks to hassox for the patch!
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What makes a good API wrapper?
As cool new RESTful services crop up practically each day, I find myself using or writing a lot of Ruby API wrappers. So much that I’ve seen some common approaches emerge, each with their own pros and cons.
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A new Ruby gem for the Readernaut API
I was so happy to discover Readernaut this weekend. It’s got a lot of features and the interface seems much more intuitive than Shelfari or Good Reads. Since John Nunemaker’s HTTParty makes writing API wrappers in Ruby so much fun, I knocked out readernaut.
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@font-face-off: Typekit vs. Font Squirrel
Now that the curtain has come down and now Typekit is available to all, let’s see how Typekit and the previously mentioned Font Squirrel stack up head-to-head.
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Rubyists: Meet Underscore.js, your new favorite Javascript library
One of my favorite aspects of developing in Rails is the console. The ability to load and interact with my Ruby objects without using the browser is powerful.
Thanks to Firebug for Firefox and Web Inspector for Webkit, I also have a console for my client-side JavaScript. I wish jQuery were as powerful when traversing raw JavaScript objects as it is traversing the DOM. Well it seems I have two wishes left for the first has been granted in Underscore.js. Read More
Sass up your WordPress themes with Compass
I’m a Rubyist. But I’m also a pragmatic front-end developer. When I have to write a full-stack solution, I pick Rails or Sinatra because writing Ruby is a joy and the Ruby ecosystem is so darn cool. But when I have to create a CMS-based site for myself or a client I love the usability and community behind WordPress. Although I can reluctantly lay Ruby aside when I extend WordPress, I really miss my syntactically awesome stylesheets. Until now.
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Add additional owners to your Gemcutter gems
Thanks to John Nunemaker for this tip.
If you need to add additional owners to your gems on Gemcutter, you can use the gem owner command like so:
$ gem owner -a codemonkey@example my-cool-gem Added owner: codemonkey@example.com Owners for gem: my-cool-gem - codemonkey@example.com - codeslinger@example.com
Hopefully this feature will be included in the web interface soon. How about forking Gemcutter and beating me to the punch?
CSS Mixins vs. multiple classes
A growing number of CSS meta-frameworks provide support for mixins. While CSS mixins provide a number of benefits, for me, they come with trade-offs.
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Hands on with Ruby 
Plan your Nextstop from Ruby — or Twitter!
I stumbled across Nextstop this week, a community driven travel site where users can post destination guides and recommend places to explore, eat & drink, or just sleep. Since I’m an API junkie, when they announced their new API this week, I just had to write a Ruby wrapper.
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