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Archive for May, 2008

Fixing e-texteditor to Properly Highlight View Layouts in Rails 2.0.2

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

For Windows-based Ruby on Rails developers, the e-texteditor is an excellent editor to use for your work. It’s a work in progress but the features are based on the highly acclaimed editor, TextMate for Mac OS X. In fact, most of the “bundles” are directly compatible between the two clients.

In Rails 2.0.2, view layout files were changed to use the .erb file extension instead of the previeous .rhtml. This means that editors that use file extensions to determine which syntax highlighting pattern to load will no longer highlight your Rails views properly.

Oh noes! Our highlighting is gone!

In order to correct this we’ll need to edit our Rails bundle to include .erb files in the files we use our Rails syntax highlighting for.

Start by going to the menu bar in e-texteditor and select: Bundles -> Edit Bundles -> Show Bundle Editor. This will give you your bundle editing screen as shown below:

So this is where the bundles live!

Scroll down until you find the “Rails” bundle. Expand that and scroll down to find the HTML (Rails) section. Click this section and you will be presented with the bundle text itself used to determine highlight rules. We’re looking for a spot in this section where the file associations are listed. See below:

Here\'s what we have to change.

Change the filetypes association language to include erb files shown below:

Change this line

Presto! Close the editor (no need to save, it does it automagically) Now open a .erb view and your syntax highlighting should work again just as shown:

Fixed text highlighting

I imagine future versions of the Rails bundle will account for this automatically. There is a similar fix procedure for fixing TextMate for Rails 2.0.2.

Hope this helps.


Social Dev Camp Wrapup

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

This past weekend I attended Social Dev Camp in Baltimore, MD. Having recently attended BarCamp Orlando I was hoping Social Dev Camp, in addition to being within a reasonable driving distance, would instill the same sense of community and inspiration that BarCamp did. I was not disappointed!

Socialdevcamp LogoSocial Dev Camp was the brain child of Dave Troy of twittervision fame, and Ann Bernard and Keith Casey of WhyGoSolo. In fact they conceived of, organized, and executed the “un-conference” in UNDER 25 days. That has to be some kind of record. Through sponsorships and donations from local businesses the group was able to cover the costs of renting space at the University of Baltimore AND provide breakfast and lunch to all attendees. Outstanding work!

The breakout sessions were broken down into four tracks with topics roughly sorted into what made logical sense based on interest. I didn’t get to attend each session but the ones I participated in were excellent. Dave Troy himself gave a talk on location-based social network services. Dave is great in front of a crowd. You can tell there is a real brain at work there but his Dave Troyeasy-going style invites audience participation and makes whatever he’s talking about very approachable. Dave started a working group called OpenLocation.org, which, among other things, hopes to solve the “Chicago Problem”. I’ll let you check the site out for exactly what that means. Towards the end of the day I sat in on a session called “JavaScript Framework Shootouts” in which Amy Hoy of twistori fame held forth about why YUI stinks and why the forthcoming scriptaculous update rocks.

I left the conference terribly impressed by everyone I met there. The east coast has some very talented and visionary people working to solve real problems. It’s obvious to me that the Amtrak Corridor development community, from Boston to Miami, is really starting to coalesce in a way that is fostering creative and active communities.

Dave Troy says they would like to plan another Social Dev Camp for September of this year. Can’t wait!

Photo Credits: Jeff Kubina , Rob Carlson

Social Dev Camp Photos on Flickr


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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

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