June 19, 2010

More interesting bookmarks

Interesting form builder plugin... Justin French's Formtastic - GitHub

Interesting article about the pro’s of using level-index arithmetic: The Higher Arithmetic - American Scientist

Note to self: To resize while maintaining aspect ratio, use “64x64>” - This will resize either the width or the height to 64 pixels and the other side will be relatively smaller. To resize with crop, use “64x64#” - This will resize in both width and height being cropped to 64 pixels and the longer of the two will be cropped evenly on either side.

Impressive potential replacement for datatable: 2dconcept - jQuery grids for your Ruby on Rails applications (jqgrid plugin)

Some Ruby best practices: Good Ruby Times

Nice wallpaper styles: DinPattern – Free seamless patterns, brushes and themes

Gradual Engagement: Beta Blog: Kill Your Signup Form with Rails

Implementing ActiveMerchant Recurring Billing on a gateway that does not yet support it: WyeWorks Blog: Active Merchant Recurring Billing

Ruport - A simple, extensible reporting system built for Rubyists:

Super easy PDF generation with Prawn and Prawnto: Videos - WindyCityRails 2009

May 17, 2010

Blueprint 24 column grid layout

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(download)

I've just created this printable 24 column Blueprint CSS
(http://blueprintcss.org/) layout for wireframing.

May 17, 2010

Tracking external/outbound links with Google Analytics & jQuery

For a related project we have undertaken whilst working on
ReservationLive, we have needed to track clicks for external links.
There are a few solutions available after a quick Google search, but
most rely on either the old "urchin" analytics code, or the newer
"ga.js" tracking code. Google recently released an asynchronous
version of their tracking code, and our solution works with that.
You'll also need the ubiquitous jQuery for this solution, but it is
assumed you have that already.

First of all, one will need to attach the 'rel' attribute to the
anchor element for external links, we're using 'external' as this
makes semantic sense.

Now, we need jQuery to pass the URL of the link to Google Analytics
when an external link is clicked. We do that with this snippet:

As you can see, all external links appear as if they are linking to
local resources in the '/outgoing/' directory of our webserver; you
can customise this as you wish. You will need to wait at least 24
hours for the new links to show up in the 'Content Overview' section
of Google Analytics.

Happy tracking!