John Gagliardi

This is a quick hitter but to remove a remote branch lets say on github you would do something like this.

git push origin :YOUR_REMOTE_BRANCH

Pretty funny stuff from Ben Nadel!

Everyone knows how awesome jQuery is and here is another quick example. The jQuery Easing plugin allows you to add rad animations very easily.

var percentBar = $(entry).find("#percentBar"); percentBar.animate({"width": percentRounded + "%"}, { duration: 3000, easing: 'easeOutBounce' })

I have a project with some simple css bar charts. When a bar value updates I call the .animate() jQuery function and use the ‘easeOutBounce’ property provided by the easing plugin. This give my bar a nice bounce to it when the value is updated.

I know this is kinda old but if you haven’t used ColdFusion varScoper then you should give it a try. It will ensure that all your variables are properly scoped. Make sure to note that if will catch variables that are commented out and also any argument variables that are not preceded with “argument” will give a false positive.

I have transfered all of my Mango Blog plugins to my github account.  Feel free to use them however you would like.

With Rails getting a lot of love recently I wanted to give it a shot.  One of the first cool things I have found is called render partial.  Here are a couple code snippets of what I learned. I am assuming you know a little bit about rails in the first place.

First I made a home controller with a index function.  Then I parsed my tumblr rss feed and set a variable called “posts”. 

class HomeController < ApplicationController

def index @posts = RSS::Parser.parse(open('http://johngag.tumblr.com/rss').read, false).items

end

end

After that I made a partial file called _post.html.erb which outputs the post title and links to the post.

<%= link_to post.title, post.link, :target => "_parent" %>

Finally in my index.html.erb view I output the rails magic. In one line of code rails loops through all the posts (or in my case I told it to loop over first 5) and output the posts according to the partial created.  This is very DRY (Dont Repeat Yourself) and I love writing less code.

<%= render :partial => "home/post", :collection => @posts.first(5) %>

I am very happy so far with how easy and magical rails has been. I cant wait to dive into writing less code to do more. 

This is my new blog home! I have tried various blogging applications but tumblr is just the best.

I will be blogging about various topics but I will be focusing mainly on my web development adventures. Do not be alarmed if you see a post or two about my beer brewing hobby though :)

Hope you enjoy,

John