Heroku is awesome! Let's say we want to copy a production database to a staging database. We can use the `pg:backups:restore` command to accomplish this. Here is an example. For the source database we are using the `production-app-name` and for stagi...

MySQL doesn't support having two columns with time stamping on both initialization and/or on updating at the same time. It would be nice to be able to do *this* where the created_at column gets the current_timestamp on initialization and the updated_at ge...

A buddy of mine is a talented, but paranoid System Administrator for a small web company. He refuses to see the truth and the beauty in the wonderful world made possible by cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2. Amazon is not the only game in town. T...

If you ever want to render a partial but don't want an error thrown you can either check for the existence of the file first params[:controller]+"/sidebar" if File.exists?(RAILS_ROOT+"/app/views/"+params[:controller]+"/_sidebar.html.erb") %> or you ca...

TinyMCE is a nice little WYSIWYG for text processing online. It uses iFrames and Javascript callbacks to manipulate textarea form fields. Using it with Rails can be somewhat problematic if you want to set up an observer on a field that TinyMCE is managing...