About
John Ford presently works for Automattic, focusing his attention on VaultPress, a realtime backup service for WordPress.org users. Passion for coding is what motivates John, but some people are beginning to question his attachment to his iPad. Mix equal parts beautiful code writer, lover of healthy living, world traveler, living room DJ, and community giver and you'll have the geek known as John Ford.
Category Archives: Programming
has_many :through Self-referential Example
While using an association table for the first time with Ruby On Rails I had a bit of trouble finding an easy to understand example of has_many :through. I needed to build a self-referencing table where People could have other People as friends through a Friendship. I was getting “stack too deep” errors, “could not find the association” errors, and … More
Execute Rails Code Before the View is Rendered
At one time, I was looking for a way to execute code for every action in my controller before the view was rendered. I saw this come up again yesterday in the #rubyonrails IRC channel so I looked at it a bit more. Currently, Rails provides a before_filter method which will “run before actions on this controller are performed” or … More
Writing a Custom FormBuilder in Rails
I’m currently working on a Ruby on Rails application where I need lots of text fields that have the same properties. I decided to override text_field and have it output all of the extra attribues automatically. This helps keep the view code cleaner, lets me change all of these text fields in one place, and also helps me avoid typing … More
Plugin: Bookmark A Page In Your PDF
With the long, yet wonderful, books in PDF format these days (Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz [570 pages]; Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas, with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt [864 pages]) there needs to be a better way to digitally bookmark where you … More