I just wrote and released my first Ruby Gem, Hashed Attributes https://rubygems.org/gems/hashed_attributes. It is a very simple ActiveRecord extension for saving variables through a serialized hash. The Gem will let you declare getter and setter methods that use a hash to store assigned data. For instance, instead of doing something like

@user.preferences[:favorite_color] = 'orange'

you can do

@user.favorite_color = 'orange'

The value for favorite color will be kept in a serialized hash.

 nil,
      :preferences => {
          :favorite_color => "orange",
      },
       :created_at => nil,
       :updated_at => nil
  }

Setup in the model is very straight forward. The first argument is the column name you want to use followed by a list of methods used as keys on the hash.

# Example model
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  hashed_attributes :preferences, :favorite_color, :theme, :plan # etc...
end

ActiveRecord is required to use this gem. Additionally, you need to add a column in your database.

# Sample migration
create_table :people do |t|
   t.text :preferences
end

To install

gem install hashed_attributes

Or place in your Rails Gemfile

gem 'hashed_attributes'

The project code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/bseanvt/hashed_attributes and https://rubygems.org/gems/hashed_attributes

Releasing this gem was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to writing more gems!

Just finishing up brewing up some fresh ground comments...