Carrierwave, my favorite file upload framework of choice in Rails requires something along the lines of 5 lines of code to set up a file upload. The uploader can then be mounted on a model and receive file_field uploads from forms. Especially with the numerous storage backends and the not so common support for ORM frameworks besides ActiveRecord Carrierwave is right on par with other important Gems like Devise.

But then, after having used it upwards of 20 times, just when you think you remember the syntax without having to check the site something unexpected puzzles you:

In my case that was a file upload that was technically working, but seemed to completely ignore the options specified in the uploader. The store_dir was ignored, the different versions were simply never called - but the file upload worked like a charm.

I thought I did everything right (the uploader code looked just fine) and apparently I was uploading files just fine - but it didn't work.

After some investigation and re-doing everything following the getting-started instructions the following code in my model caught my eye:

  mount_uploader :menu_image

Since my uploader was called MenuImageUploader I thought: well that looks reasonable.

Turns out I was wrong (shocking I know) .. Carrierwave requires you to explicitly specify the desired uploader class instead of deducing it from the name.

  mount_uploader :menu_image, MenuImageUploader

Suddently everything started working again, yay. So: If you ever need to just simply upload a file that has no special storage directory or other processing going on - just mount a uploader without a uploader class. Carrierwave will default to Carrierwave::Uploader::Base for you. And if that wasn't you intention - it will still screw you over :).

Maybe I should raise this as an issue with the developers. At least a simple logger.warn would be in order in cases like these.

I may have hinted at it once or twice that I really love how Rails makes Internationalization (I18n) really simple (in stark contrast to what I had to do back then in .NET). But one thing Rails I18n will not do for you is translating the models in your database, which is to me one of the major problems I often face at work when doing I18n. (Of course there are gems that alleviate that pain)

So today I was sitting down to write a system design for a new application at work that has to be localized in a lot of different languages while still being fast. After thinking a bit about the problem I decided that doing so in ActiveRecord would be cumbersome to say the least, and I decided for a Document-Database approach. Since I know MongoDB best I went out and looked at the Mongoid documentation on how to best integrate transparent localization into the system (fully expecting that I'd have to implement this myself).

Well, Mongoid blew my mind:

class Post
  include Mongoid::Document

  field :title, localized: true
end

That's it, Mongoid will now transparently store the title field in a hash and return the correct value depending on I18n.locale. We are talking literally zero cost here. Mongoid even accounts for the reality of translations not always being present so you might want to fallback to another locale instead of not presenting anything. Wow..

So here is how to set this up with fallbacks inside your config/application.rb:

config.i18n.fallbacks = true
config.i18n.default_locale = :en

That's all, and here is how it works:

post = Post.new(:title => 'Hello World')

puts post.title # => "Hello World"
I18n.locale = :de
puts post.title # => "Hello World"

post.title = "Hallo Welt"
puts post.title # => "Hallo Welt"

I18n.locale = :en
puts post.title # => "Hello World"

Unfortunately this at the moment only works for regular fields, not for relations so I still have to do some work in my current project - but even the field i18n saves me a lot of headache.

Multiple fallbacks: Something that is not really covered in the documentation but becomes apparent when you look at the tests is that you can define a callback chain per locale. Meaning you can tell Mongoid to do go through a list of locales while searching for an existing value.

::I18n.fallbacks[:de] = [ :de, :en, :es ]

Mongoid will now first look for a german value, then fall back to the english one, and if that's not present either it will try the spanish one. Very handy especially if you run the locale schema down to country codes like 'de-AT', 'de-CH'. So for example this is the fallback chain for switzerland:

::I18n.fallbacks['de-CH'] = ['de-DE', 'de', 'en']
::I18n.fallbacks['fr-CH'] = ['fr-FR', 'fr', 'en']
::I18n.fallbacks['it-CH'] = ['it-IT', 'it', 'en']

Yes, Switzerland is a mess - but at least it gives you a good example for crazy fallbacks.

It's been some time since I did write a blog post, and I must say it was not for a lack of ideas. It was mostly the prospect of having to write these posts in HTML into my Wordpress interface that led me to abandon the idea.

And I think that's the main problem: I believe HTML is a bad format for writing posts. And no amount of WYSIWYG will change that, for all the subtle codehighlights I like in my posts the Wordpress WYSIWYG is just not the least bit useful. And don't get me started on posting source.

There are basically 2 solutions I had with my Wordpress installation: Either use a clientside syntax-highlighter or rely on Gist to post code in a human-readable fashion that's also easy on the eyes.

And I hated that.. I hated doing the back and forth between Gist and the site, and fixing errors in the code was always a pain. And as much as I like the syntax-highlighter script, it slows the page down a lot. Especially the front-page, even when the user may not be looking at a post with code at the moment code on the page will still be parsed.

A good solution to this problem seemed to be Jekyll, where you write your posts in simple markdown or textile and code gets syntax highlighted automatically on the server. I tried that some years ago, but for my style of writing it turned out to be even worse than Wordpress.

Why? Simple: I didn't start from scratch but rather imported my whole Blog into Jekyll when I started the experiment. So I was running Jekyll with syntax highlighting on on about 300 posts all the time. And the compilation did run for about a minute every damn time! To add insult to injury: at the time I didn't have a rsync capable hosting setup so I had to FTP the whole site.

So a few weeks ago I started to tinker around with Ember.js, and naturally I found myself writing a sample blog application. And that's when it hit me: writing a blog is f***ing easy. There is a reason any web frameworks worth it's salt is demoed using a blog engine.

And it turns out, what few features I want from my blog engine are usually all covered by these very simple demo apps :). So I ditched all the Ember.js experiments and started to write my own blog engine that had to do the following things:

• Look exactly as my old blog
• Accept Markdown input
• Provide syntax highlighting
• Let me schedule posts to appear at a later date
• Preserve permalinks

And that's it - almost laughable how simple my requirements actually are. I decided to ditch some more complexity I felt no longer required (since RSS is dead) and built a really simple rails application ontop of the awesome libraries rouge and redcarpet. So my blog now accepts GitHub Flavored Markdown - all with less than 5 lines of code.

And the results are really awesome:

puts "I <3 Ruby"

So I sat down and built the blog in probably half a day. Maybe a bit more since I wanted to have some shiny like: nice tagging with autocompletion, real time post preview while typing and drag & drop file upload for images.

I'll post the code once I cleaned up the deployment mess I created (no secure database.yml management, secret.rb in git etc) but once done I'll post it here anyways.

Next up for me is trying to figure out a good way to make the blog theme-able. I'd love to experiment a bit with Rails engines and how this can be leveraged to separate themes from applications. And now that I've got my own little Rails playground once again it's the perfect opportunity to do so :).

Oh, and I need to leverage caching. After a cursory exploration today it seems caching would turn this blog into a statically generated static site. Only problem seems to be the cache invalidation, but I am sure I can devise some scheme to get around that that (short of doing 5 rm -rf calls).