Nate Bird's Profile

I use amCharts. It has some pretty advanced charting features for those needing them. It is a commercial product but well maintained and totally worth it. Available in Flash and Javascript versions.

It seems like an appropriate episode to revise… Thanks Ryan!

Yes. History is taken into account for validating unique slugs. This can also create a problem if users can change titles or names. They could theoretically reserve various usernames.

HI Ryan, I've noticed that you have used a few environment variables in the recent episodes. Do you have any opinions on how best ways of setting them? IE - one config file vs in each environment file? Maybe this could be a short episode on how environment variables work and boot sequences?

Thanks!

You'll need at least Devise 1.5 to work with OmniAuth 1.0+

You can't really remove the default OmniAuth identity pages because they are part of the omniauth-identity gem. You just stop using them.

I would also like to see an episode on insufficient funds and subscription cancellations. I would also like to see how you create tests for external web services like paypal, stripe or whatever.

Very nice recommendation! I hadn't seen stripe before and have been grudgingly testing other payment processors. This looks fantastic and very reasonable

Another great discovery Ryan! Do you know if Pry works with Ruby 1.8.7 or is it just for Ruby 1.9?

I put images specific for my app in the app/assets/images directory. Depending on the complexity of the application you may want to store some images in the lib/assets or vendor/assets directories. It actually doesn't matter but convention says:

app/assets - assets specific to your application (custom images, custom javascript, etc.)
lib/assets - assets that you wrote but are may be shared across applications (shared icons, javascript, base stylesheet)
vendor/assets - assets not specific to you app or written by you (Jquery plugins, CSS frameworks, etc)

Can you share your helper in a gist?

No need for lvh.me in development if you are using Pow. It handles subdomains automatically.

Ryan has an example of setting the subdomain to false in the show notes. You can use it like this.

= link_to "terms", terms_path(:subdomain => false)`

With an existing application it was useful to automate some of the heavy lifting converting stylesheets to scss. Here is a blog post I found which provides the command line tool sass-convert syntax.

Peepcode also has a screencast on Coffeescript for those wishing to see more in-depth examples of Coffeescript usage.

Thanks Ryan for another great screencast. I've already cleaned up a bunch of my javascript and my JS files just feel so much more manageable and readable now.

When I saw your tweet this morning I knew there was a redesign coming! Awesome job!

Are there any speed or memory benefits to using methods rather than instance variables other than the more robust action caching?

Is there any downside to using Gravatar? I know that on my wife's blog we disabled the gravatars because the comment threads were taking forever to load because of all the gravatar calls. This sort of optimization is outside of this episode but it would be cool to discuss how to efficiently pull resources from outside services.

Comment while signed in from Github. Thanks Ryan!