Using Attached Files in Mephisto

The Mephisto blog engine has added the facility to attach files to an article rather than just embedding in the article content itself.

I’ve now added some code which will show an attached image at the start on an article. You can do this by editing the home.liquid template to something like this:

{% if article.assets.size != 0 %}
  {% for asset in article.assets %}
    {% if asset.is_image %}
      <p class="image"><img src="{{ asset.path }}"/></p>
    {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}
{% endif %}

By: Nikhil Bach

This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything - and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”

A brief excursion into Greasemonkey

By this point, I would suspect that most Firefox readers who are reading this know about Greasemonkey. If not, go forth and read. I additionally suspect the same is true for Twitter. If not, you know what to do.

One thing that annoys me about Twitter is the avatar display on a user’s page. If I’m looking at (for instance) Geoff’s page, I see a lot of little tiny icons that I don’t recognize. I find myself hovering over each to see if they’re someone I know so I can click and friend them. I got sick of the hover delay, so I decided to fix it. I wrote a userscript that puts each users’ name next to their avatar image, and puts each on its own line.

I’d never worked with Greasemonkey, and only recently started playing with Javascript, so it was an experience. I was able to find a cool little XPath helper on the Greasemonkey wiki, which helped immensely. The code to actually do the manipulation is only about 10 lines long.

If you’re interested, you can grab the latest and greatest version of the script by clicking here. I should also plug my toys repository… it’s got all manner of fun junk laying about. Check it out with svn co http://svn.bleything.net/toys.

A brief excursion into Greasemonkey

By this point, I would suspect that most Firefox readers who are reading this know about Greasemonkey. If not, go forth and read. I additionally suspect the same is true for Twitter. If not, you know what to do.

One thing that annoys me about Twitter is the avatar display on a user’s page. If I’m looking at (for instance) Geoff’s page, I see a lot of little tiny icons that I don’t recognize. I find myself hovering over each to see if they’re someone I know so I can click and friend them. I got sick of the hover delay, so I decided to fix it. I wrote a userscript that puts each users’ name next to their avatar image, and puts each on its own line.

I’d never worked with Greasemonkey, and only recently started playing with Javascript, so it was an experience. I was able to find a cool little XPath helper on the Greasemonkey wiki, which helped immensely. The code to actually do the manipulation is only about 10 lines long.

If you’re interested, you can grab the latest and greatest version of the script by clicking here. I should also plug my toys repository… it’s got all manner of fun junk laying about. Check it out with svn co http://svn.bleything.net/toys.

Automated Testing of web applications

So the better half of me(no, I am still single!), the tester has woken up and here are some random thoughts about automated testing tools.

Coming from an Automated Testing background, I always find it interesting to try out new automation testing tools. I have used Rational Functional Tester, SilkTest, Rational Robot. Recently Watir and Selenium was also added to my Automated Testing skills.

Past
For products like RationalRobot, SilkTest, QTP, there was always a steep learning curve because of the proprietary languages they use to support for coding.Rational Functional Tester(formally known as Rational XDE Tester) received a warm welcome by the community because of Java being the langauge to code in for tests.

Recent Past
Then came some keyword driven approaches(SAFS), which added a layer of abstraction over these automated tools,which end-users to type in the automated tests from spreadsheets once developers have a built a test automation framework in place.

Present
Thanks to AJAX, automated testing has become a tougher challenge now. with inline popups, dynamic asynchronous requests springing up everywhere.

Tools like Watir and Selenium came to the rescue. they have been there unnoticed from sometime, but now thanks to opensource, they are now getting much deserved attention.

I recently used Watir and Selenium and was amazed by the ease of use that they provide. Both of them provide DSL like implementation with their commands(Ruby selenese for selenium). About selenium, I particularly liked the idea of cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility.

In coming days I am going to try out selenium extensively and will try to gauge its level of support for problems faced by traditional automated tools.

Long Hiatus

My last post was on 26 March 2007. Its been 78 days since I haven't posted anything.. Its not that I don't have anything to write, my schedules off late have been keeping me off blogger.
There are so many things to write about that I have experienced and learned in last 2 months. I will try to cover some of those things in my coming posts, so stay connected.

Testing Helpers in Rails

It can be useful at times to unit test helpers to make sure they generate correct html. It is not obvious how to do this at first. So far I have been testing my helper by defining a class “MyClass” at the top of my unit test and including all the appropriate modules. I also need to define a url_for method if I ever want to test helpers that generate links.

The code follows (Replace MyHelper with your appropriate helper class);

class MyClass
  include ERB::Util
  include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
  include ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper
  include MyHelper

  def url_for(options)
    ActionController::Routing::Routes.reload if ActionController::Routing::Routes.empty?
    generated_path, extra_keys = ActionController::Routing::Routes.generate_extras(options, {})
    generated_path
  end
end

Then in my tests I do something like;

def test_revision_link
  assert_equal(
    "<a href=\"http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/jikesrvm?view=rev&amp;revision=22\">22</a>", 
    MyClass.new.revision_link(22))
end

Seems easy enough to do in retrospect but things usually do.

Safari 3.0 and the Submit Button

Safari has come out with their public beta and every is excited because the browser is now available for Windows XP/Vista; but there is also a beta available for Mac users.

So I downloaded it and I started to use it. I love the ability to resize text areas and there is a Web Inspector (only for OS X) that allows you to see what properties are available to HTML nodes and their styles.

So I was using it and I noticed something: Safari now styles submit buttons. Do you remember that aqua button that you could never do anything to? Well now it responds to border stylings and the like. Interesting.

Safari 3.0 and the Submit Button

Safari has come out with their public beta and every is excited because the browser is now available for Windows XP/Vista; but there is also a beta available for Mac users.

So I downloaded it and I started to use it. I love the ability to resize text areas and there is a Web Inspector (only for OS X) that allows you to see what properties are available to HTML nodes and their styles.

So I was using it and I noticed something: Safari now styles submit buttons. Do you remember that aqua button that you could never do anything to? Well now it responds to border stylings and the like. Interesting.

> YouTube Gem 0.8.6 Released

This is mainly a bugfix release but also makes it easier to search for videos by category. Searching by category greatly helps in finding videos that are more relevant. You can now do:

videos = videos_by_category_and_tag(YouTube::Category::MUSIC, 'bush')

videos = videos_by_category_and_tag(YouTube::Category::NEWS_POLITICS, 'bush')

For more details check out the CHANGELOG. Thanks to all the contributers, Walter Korman, Lucas Carlson, Rob Tsuk, and Thomas Cox.

Related posts:

> YouTube Gem 0.8.6 Released

This is mainly a bugfix release but also makes it easier to search for videos by category. Searching by category greatly helps in finding videos that are more relevant. You can now do:

videos = videos_by_category_and_tag(YouTube::Category::MUSIC, 'bush')

videos = videos_by_category_and_tag(YouTube::Category::NEWS_POLITICS, 'bush')

For more details check out the CHANGELOG. Thanks to all the contributers, Walter Korman, Lucas Carlson, Rob Tsuk, and Thomas Cox.

Related posts:

make_resourceful Talk at CVREG Tonight

This month's CVREG meeting is tonight. We're gonna be going over the happenings of RailsConf. I

'll be giving a talk on refactoring thick RESTful controllers with make_resourcesful. Seeing that yesterday was WWDC, I didn't get much time to prepare it (YES you can ONLY prepare 1 day in advance for Ruby presentations, didn't you know?). It's going to be a live code talk so i think it'll be pretty interesting. I always prefer doing/seeing those myself.

There's no central location for the plugin so here are some links:

• http://svn.hamptoncatlin.com/make_resourceful/trunk/
• http://groups.google.com/group/make_resourceful
• http://nex3.leeweiz.net/posts/7

If you can, try to make it out. It's gonna be a good one. Oh, and of course the usual free soda and pizza, you know how we roll.