See the content of the picture above? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could reduce all of your controllers down to 3 lines? Well you can’t do all of them, but if you are adhering the a RESTful approach then chances are most of the controllers can be condensed considerably using make_resourceful.

Many clients I work with today have come from a wealth of experience in other media formats, be it the big screen or traditional print. They often bring with them a pre-conceived notion of how they want things to look and work on the site. Quite often it is a direct translation of their existing media strategies and they want to keep the content and format consistent for the sake of “branding”.

The web however is a fundamentally different beast than most mediums due to both the way the user interacts with it and the immensely broad reach. So a slightly different approach is needed. Pay attention to these things, and you’ll ultimately end up with a happier audience and happier clients.

Engine Yard, the current big daddy of rails hosting, decided to put a bounty out to solve a problem all the newly converted rails/nginx users would have to some degree but have previously been ignoring. The load balancer in nginx works in a round robin fashion meaning that any long running request has the potential to cause another user to queue behind it, rather than getting served by one of the free and waiting mongrels. Well wait no more!

Carsten Nielsen has created an amazing plugin for rails called email veracity. It takes all of the heavy lifting out of what can often be a problematic part of data validation, and takes it a step further than most.

Matt Mower has released a handy little tool called Mailtrap. Basically what it does as act as a very simple SMTP server that accepts requests from ActionMailer, but writes them to file instead of emailing them on.

Not that there haven’t already been high profile players talking about ruby and rails, but Ebay have just recently launched own rails app called MicroPlace. It’s a micro-donation site like Kiva where you can invest directly into those in the 3rd world and help them escape the poverty cycle.

The folks over at prototype have had their latest 1.6 release in beta for a while, and I was using it quite extensively with much joy at my last client. One of the major enhancements to the entire system has been the reworking of the Element and Object classes, and the underlying Class object.

I’m a little delayed on the uptake of this, but capistrano has had an update with a host of useful new additions. Of most interest to me is the new baked in support for additional source control systems.

Sorry about the lull in posts of late all. I’ve been busy traveling and catching up on much lost quality time with my girlfriend who has returned from Australia. Big news today though, with Google looking to taken on the Facebook Application juggernaut with their own API.