This post by David King on inline Graphviz graphs inspired me to write my first Rack middleware in a long time. David's code uses PHP on the server-end coupled with javascript to parse out Graphviz data from script tags, and then render the graphs with the appropriate Graphviz ...
Sliding Stats is a small little piece of code I'm working on to plug into any Rack enabled Ruby web app (and practically any Ruby web-framework can work with Rack these days) to give me glimpse of what's going on without having to tail referrer logs etc.
It doesn't do ...
As most bloggers I like to keep an eye on where my traffic is coming from, and especially when there are surges in traffic. I'm using both Google Analytics and Feedburner for stats, and it works great for trends, but not see what's happening right now.
This morning I needed a ...
In the discussion following my entry "Why Rails is total overkill and why I love Rack" several comments raised the issue of whether high coupling is always bad. My answer was that I believe it is, but at the same time it can be worth it sometimes.
It seems like ...
Rails is total overkill. It tries to do "everything" in a massive framework where major components are tightly intervowen. Smaller frameworks like Merb and Camping have already shown you don't NEED this. I argue you don't need a framework at all - you need highly cohesive, loosely coupled components. That is ...
I'm playing with a small web based RSS reader, and one of the things it does is cache a lot of data to reduce the impact on the sites I follow feeds from. However I realized this a couple of days ago I'd completely forgotten to set cache headers, and I ...
UPDATE: I have just added another Rack entry: Rack Middleware: Adding cache headers
Rack is a common API between webservers and frameworks for Ruby. It allows all kinds of nice stuff, like chaining filters that each do one small and self-contained part of the processing and are easy ...