Are you running a Rails app in production and making regular updates to the codebase? If so, you probably already appreciate the need for an easily deployed maintenance page for handling all requests during significant code updates, particularly those running migrations and altering the DB schema. Luckily, existing tutorials on this topic (Custom Maintenance Pages, Rails maintenance page with images and styles) make Capistrano-powered maintenance pages look pretty straight-forward.

Recently I have been so busy with my main projects, Notipal became left untouched. This wasn’t because I wasn’t excited about the project, but just that I couldn’t commit any particular dates to the 3 or so days it needs to become launch-ready.

When speaking to Neil about the issue of not knowing when I will find these 3 days, he came up with idea of spending an hour, or even half an hour, every evening and pre-assigning all the leftover to-dos to their own date – rather than trying to tackle them all in 3 sessions.

In the past I have always tried to avoid working on different things for a small amount of time each because of the cost (in time) associated with figuring out where you were and what needs to be done next, but as Notipal is not a complicated application, I thought I’d give it a try…

With the economic climate in such an awful state, project management skills are becoming increasingly important as businesses strive to minimise wasted money.

Skipping formalising a design process is the equivalent of throwing yours and your clients cash right out of the window.

After updating the ThinkRefresh blog, for a while there was no spam which was nice, but the bots quickly returned and were back at it. My old anti-spam solution didn’t work particularly well, I was using Jonathan Snook’s method of building up a score from various criteria, however this still required me to check my email notifications for people who’d been wrongly marked as spam.

An ideal spam solution places no visible limitations on a visitor, but also doesn’t involve any work by the site’s owner, hence why I am against using CAPTCHA. From this I think I may have come up with a pretty good solution – the blog certainly hasn’t had any spam since I installed it.

I have a few peers who are intending to go into web design / development, but are planning on going to university first, and others who are looking at the same career path, but already at university. Based on the experience of myself and my coursemates, I’d like to share an insight into what university can provide young web designers, and what you need to be doing to prepare yourself for the exciting world of work.

Having just completed a unit on the Semantic Web, which included an essay on it’s adoption, I thought I’d explain it to those who are new to the concept and provide my honest opinion.

Paperclip has to be one of my favorite plugins for Rails, providing simple storage and validation for uploads, and thumbnailing of images.

Whilst it isn’t technically broken, for small image sizes many people want to convert 24-bit (semi-transparent capable) PNGs to JPG and sadly this creates images containing artifacts where the transparency is assumed to be black not white. Luckily the fix is very simple, but it took me a while to figure out, so as always I thought I’d share it with you guys & gals.

The last ThinkRefresh article covered simple specifications for client work. In this post, we’re concentrating on simple ideas for personal projects and startups.

Everyone has at least a couple of ideas which they’d like to pursue; the problem is, which one should you work on? You only have so much time in the day, and even if you’re the best developer out there, you’re always going to be limited by what you can achieve around current commitments, be it to friends, family, existing employment, or client work. As we’ve previously discussed, working all hours of the day can negatively impact your productivity.

Writing a specification for a website or web application can be difficult, what do you include? How much transparency should there be? What about pricing?

Here are some tips to start you on your way in a simple who, what, why, when & where format based on what I’ve learnt over the past few years.

Just a quick slice of code for you, if you’ve followed the Starling and Workling screencast on Railscasts and you want to run them in production, then you’ll probably want to manage them through Capistrano.

I spent a large portion of yesterday getting the commands to work correctly, so here is my Capistrano tasks.

We can all fall into the trap of hacking away until dawn, but it’s just not healthy to be doing repeatedly, especially if you’re like me and tend to drink more Red Bull than the yearly recommendation in one night.

My developer diet isn’t simply looking at the food and drink we consume but how we use our time, and how improving this can lead to not only a better lifestyle, but increased productivity also.

Routes define what URLs are used to access different parts of your application.

When you run the scaffold generator described in the previous article routes are setup for you automatically but they only setup the default settings, sometimes you need something a little more complex.

In this article, I will show you how routes work and how to set them up yourself. You can download a video version of this article, however the article is more up-to-date.

So you’re just about to crack on and dive into that code, but wait, you don’t even need to do that! Rails comes with generators for basic functionality so you can get going as quickly as possible.

Because Rails follows the strict file structure we covered in the previous article, you can have a large amount of files automatically generated for you, because it knows where to put them.

You also can download a video version of this article, however the article is more in-depth.

Sometimes it’s nice to have an easy place you can update options without having them hard coded into files buried in your application.

I find it somewhat bizarre that this is not included in the Rails framework, however it’s probably to do with keeping the directory tree clean. Anyway, it’s not difficult to implement yourself.

When starting a project Rails automatically creates a large tree structure of folders and files, so what are they all for?

You can download a video version of this article.

So you want to learn Ruby on Rails? Whether you are comfortable with programming or new to writing your own applications and websites – this guide is for you. This is the first article of many where we will cover everything you need to know to get to grips with programming and building your own web applications with Rails.

We won’t be starting with building a fully blown social network application to rival Facebook or anything of that sort, so don’t worry about being thrown in at the deep end – we’re taking this one slowly.

You can download a video version of this article, however the article covers the topic in a greater depth.

You may have noticed ThinkRefresh has gone through a few changes. Most apparent of all, the layout has changed and my backlog of articles and screencasts has disappeared from the list (you can find them at the bottom of this article though), I have also updated my blog system which I coded in Rails.

Recently I have been giving many presentations at university, and also watched others, some dire, some brilliant. You could immediately see who had put the effort in, for whom presentations were second nature, and who were simply let down by their slides.

I am no guru of presentations, but I do like to make notes on others presentations to improve my own work. Because presentations are becoming increasingly common in the workplace and events like BarCamp are cropping up more and more I thought it would be a good idea to pass these notes on.