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Protecting your website forms and visitors from spam

Posted Sat Jan 31 at 05:37 PM by Kip

If a blog post receives a good amount of attention from humans, it will also start getting attention from spam bots and scrapers. This puts both your website content and your contributing visitors at risk of being spammed.


Sending tons of emails in Ruby on Rails with ar_mailer

Posted Thu Aug 07 at 03:30 PM by Kip — 55 comments

So you've had some success using sendmail to send one-off emails like order receipts, password reset confirmations and welcome letters. But what happens when you need to be able to send 5,000 newsletter emails to your entire contact database?


Recurring tasks in Ruby on Rails using runner and cron jobs

Posted Thu Jul 03 at 03:08 PM by Kip — 19 comments

If you have a website that has a need for nightly database maintenance, Rails provides a very simple solution for interacting with your application on a recurring schedule. It's a script called "runner" and is amazingly simple to use.


Easily show charts and graphs alongside statistics

Posted Thu May 29 at 04:56 PM by Kip

I don't see too many people taking advantage of the Google Chart API. In just a single image tag, you can add a slick looking chart or graph to your page, right next to an otherwise boring looking table of statistics.


Making your web photo galleries rock with Lightbox

Posted Wed May 28 at 07:38 PM by Kip — 6 comments

Don't just link each of those thumbnails to the full version of the photo in a new browser window. That's not very suave, and you know it! You've probably seen some awesome CSS-based large image popups when clicking thumbnails. It's probably Lightbox.