Linux users of the world unite… today is 1234567890 day. At 3:30pm today, Unix time will equal exactly 1234567890. It’s the geek version of the year 2000!
Author Archives: Brian
Rails 2.2.2 memoization gotchas
For various reasons, we are still running on Apache 1.3 which is fine, except for the fact that there is no easy way of determining whether a request is via an SSL session or not.
Unfortunately, this process was broken by the upgrade to Rails 2.2.2.
Continue readingWrite good product descriptions!
It never fails to amaze me how many people are creating stores and populating them with 1 line product descriptions. I’m stunned by this, as stores set up like this are bound to fail despite our best efforts to make them search engine friendly.
Whoever said “a picture is worth a thousand words” probably never managed to get a website ranked highly in the search engines! As far as Google, Yahoo or Altavista are concerned, a picture is not worth anything. Continue reading
How to Fake an Uploaded File
Our store software contains an extensive set of routines for processing uploaded images and resizing them into various image sizes. We’ve recently been adding some code to support a bulk import function and it’s become necessary to somehow fake uploading a file, given a specific URL for an image.
The basic plan is to use Net::HTTP to connect to the remote server and grab the image and save it in a temporary file. It turns out that Rails contains a UploadedTempfile class which is a subclass of Tempfile, and this is used by the CGI routines to handle any uploaded files.
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