If you write in Markdown on a Mac you'll no doubt have dabbled with TextMate at some point. If you did, perhaps you discovered some of TextMate's marvellous Markdown mode commands, such as "Google for the highlighted text, and convert it to a link to the first search result" (if memory serves, it was Cmd-Alt-Ctrl-L)?

Editor support like that makes writing in Markdown very productive, but these days I tend to pen my blog posts in simpler editors. Luckily, with Markdown Service Tools you can now setup similar keybindings that work in any app built on top of Cocoa (which is pretty much all of them).

Continue reading

I've been reading Execute this week, a book about how we can act on inspiration to create great things, fast. It tells the story of how Drew Wilson conceived, built and shipped a competitor to PayPal in five days (as if to make the point, Josh Long and Drew Wilson wrote the book itself in a week). One of the ideas that has resonated most strongly with me is the "inspiration battery".

Continue reading

When a bug has crept in to your code that you're having trouble fixing, it helps to know when it was introduced. If you can prove which code caused the bug you can normally work out why. The git bisect command is here to help you track it down...

Continue reading

When was the last time you finished some web development work (on your shiny, modern operating system) only to find that it didn't work in IE8. Or in IE9. Or a reasonably recent version of Opera. If you're developing web sites profesionally, you need to test them in multiple browsers running on multiple operating systems. I used to maintain virtual machines running Windows that could connect to my local dev server. These days I use BrowserStack.

Continue reading

When you're running a startup you get asked for your business card. A lot. While you're still in private beta and are controlling how many people can access your app it's fairly common to send people an invitation code, which they can use on your sign up page to get access to your app. That's what I've done with Agile Planner. Why not hand out invite codes on your business card?

I'll show you how I did it

One of active record’s less well known features is the default_scope class method. I've just added support for deleting cards to Agile Planner. Rather than destroy users’ data immediately when they click the delete button, I wanted to give them an opportunity to recover from mistakes, but I didn't have time to implement a full undo system right now.

Continue reading

On the face of it, deploying a Rails app to Heroku is very simple. You just push your Git repository to Heroku, then sit back and watch. Unfortunately it's not quite that simple when you need to put the site into maintenance mode, migrate the database, and then disable maintenance mode again.

Let's automate it

I just deployed an app to Heroku that needs to read its data from a local YAML file in order to function. It runs fine on my Mac, but fails with a nasty exception on Heroku. Luckily, it's an easy fix...

Continue reading