I'm Darren, I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and web guru, I live in Parksville/Qualicum Beach and this is my website

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I just learned that if you ad “&fmt=18″ to the url of any youtube video like this => http://youtube.com/watch?v=EzWPAGvPuSU&fmt=18 you can view that video if it was uploaded with a better resolution than the default youtube res in higher quality! I tried it on a bunch and it works sweet! Now I wonder if everyone knew this if youtubes bandwidth would go through the roof?

ICANN just passed a regulation saying what domains on the internet can be used. What does this mean? Well, it means were going to be able to have our domain extensions whatever we like by the sounds of it. This will open up huge doors for the world. WOOOAH! Holy snapping turtles! This is cool! I think we are going to have another dot com crazy frenzy. I’m assuming it’s going to really change the way search engines work too.

UPDATE: JJ from Dreamhost have a hilarious writeup on this on the official dreamhost blog

There are some pretty sweet plugins out there for Ruby on Rails, but being a beginer with this frame work I’ve found and used these five the most. In no particular order:

1) ATTACHMENT_FU:

Hmmmm, how do you say? Image, photo, graphic management with only writing about 10 lines of code? How bout, BOO YA YIPPIE WOO HOO go suck it PHP! JK I still love you php but just not like Ruby on Rails.

2) DELAYED_JOB

Delayed job is a plugin that let you send or offload processes into the background, so if you have a script that would normally take extremely long to do and don’t want the user waiting till it’s finished this is a plugin you want to checkout.

3) WILL_PAGINATE:

Wow a plugin for pagination! And I’m only writing: <%= will_paginate @subscribers %> Holly woowsers where do I sign up?

4) RESTFUL_AUTHENTICATION:

So authenticating can be downright hard, confusing and annoying… well to do it right and with no security flaws that is. So why not just use someone’s tried, testing and tough like a champ code that allows for admin authentication, sign up activation and more? This plugin rules and your only writing one line of code to tell it which methods should be closed to the public. It also gives you a wacka load of helpful methods to use all over your application.

5) PERMALINK_FU:

This is one cool plugin. When you have a CMS and you allow for people to add; lets say pages to their site, you can use this plugin by putting a line of code or two in your model to automatically create a friendly url. Example: Page called “This Plugin Rocks!” will create a url called this-plugin-rocks! It’s really that simple.

6) WHENEVER

Run scripts, rake tasks etc like cronjobs in pure Ruby. This is much easier than modifying your crontab. This plugin does it for you.

7) CACHE_FU

If you want caching and use memcache, this is a sweet plugin to checkout, although the documentation isn’t very good, you can do a ton of great caching with this cache_fu.

8) FACTORY_GIRL

Factories not fixtures? Yes please, write factories that make it way way easier for you to maintain data in Rails tests.

The Pluralizer is the sweetest online tool for finding out how to name and configure Ruby on Rails model, controller and databases names and classes.