I have been a fan of the CSS frameworks for a while now. I started with YUI and now use Blueprint or 960.gs on a regular basis. What I never liked about the frameworks was the need to add all of the extra classes to the HTML markup. It seemed messy, wasn’t semantic (not that I am a fanatic about that), and made it harder to reuse partials in my Rails projects.

CSS Improved

For a while now there has been SASS, which allows you to write CSS-like files that get translated into CSS. The advantage is that you can now use things like nested rules, variables, mixins, and more. The markup is similar to CSS so the learning curve is minimal. On top of that, there is Compass, which adds some of the popular CSS frameworks as mixins. Now it is easy to mixin the styles of the frameworks to your semantic classes in the CSS without adding all of the extra framework specific classes to your HTML markup.

What I did not like about SASS and Compass was the dependency on HAML. I have tried to make the switch form ERB to HAML and I know that you can use SASS and Compass without using HAML in your templates. But it always seemed like an extra unneeded dependency in my apps.

Less CSS

I recently came across LESS, a Ruby gem similar to SASS. The idea is that you can write .less files that are CSS-like and they will be translated into CSS. The advantage, as I see it, is that you can use existing .css files as .less files since the syntax is so similar. In addition to the standard CSS syntax, you also get nested rules, variables, and mixins, just like SASS, but without the extra dependency. You can also import other CSS files as-is, like the CSS frameworks, and mix those styles into your semantic styles. This eliminates the need for Compass to provide the SASS-ified version of the framework.

The gem itself is not specific to Rails and can be used on any project. You just need to run the LESS compiler to translate the .less file into a .css file. There is a Rails plugin that make it easy to start using LESS in your Rails projects.

LESS In Action

So what does it all look like? I will leave you with an example of how it all fits together.

@import 'blueprint/screen.css';

#content {
  .container;
  .clearfix;
  #main {
    .column;
    .span-18;
  }
  #sidebar {
    .column;
    .span-6;
    .last;
  }
}

#footer {
  .container;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: .75em;
  color: #666;
}

You can see more in my Basejumper, a starter Rails application.

I do not hide the fact that I like to try out new ideas by building lots of little applications. One thing I find myself doing is recreating many of the same pieces for each application. So I finally gave in and built a default template for the way I like all of my applications to start. There are other starter apps, but this one is tailored to my idiosyncrasies.

You can find the project, Basejumper, at: http://github.com/gdagley/basejumper

What is included?

Blueprint CSS (http://www.bluprintcss.org)

Say what you will about CSS frameworks, but they make my life a lot easier. From the website, it “gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.” There are official plugins for the framework, like “buttons” and “link-icons”, and other user created ones, like silksprite (http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/SilkSprite).

Authlogic (http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic)

The way I think authentication should be done. Instead of copying a lot of authentication logic (encrypting passwords, remember tokens, etc.) into your user model, it is kept in the gem and is easily updatable. It has lots of configuration options to fit with your authentication needs and some really good tutorials.

In app/models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_authentic
end

Configatron (http://github.com/markbates/configatron)

This is great way to store application wide configuration and settings. By adding an initializer to load the config.yml, you can access configuration anywhere in the app.

In config/initializers/load_config.rb:

configatron.configure_from_yaml("config/config.yml", :hash => Rails.env)

And in config/config.yml

development: &local
    property1: value1
    property2: value2

test:
  <<: *local
  value2: test_value2

production:
  <<: *local
  value2: prod_value2

Searchlogic (http://github.com/binarylogic/searchlogic)

From the same folks who brought you Authlogic, there is Searchlogic. You will always need pagination. You may not think so now, but believe me, you will. So just start out with it enabled. What I really, really like about Searchlogic, is not just the pagination support, but how easy it makes building advanced search forms (including searching nested objects). And again, there is a great tutorial

log-buddy (http://github.com/relevance/log_buddy)

For the lazy debugger in all of us. How many times have you typed:

some_var = 'some_value'
logger.debug "some_var = #{some_var}" 

Now try this

some_var = 'some_value'
d { some_var }

which will log

some_var = 'some_value'  

micronaut and micronaut-rails (http://github.com/spicycode/micronaut and http://github.com/spicycode/micronaut-rails)

It just makes more sense to me. Like RSpec, only fewer calories. micronaut is a BDD framework similar to RSpec. In fact it uses all the same RSpec matchers, so there is not a new syntax to learn. And it adds metadata to the loaded examples that is useful for deciding which tests to run, exclude, document, etc. or building additional tools for your example suite.

The application currently has examples (a.k.a. specs) for most of the existing code. Adding new examples, should be quick and easy. To see it all, start with rake examples

beholder treasure map (http://github.com/spicycode/beholder)

I like continuous integration. I work for a company that likes continuous integration. Having continuous testing locally let’s me as soon as I break something.

beholder watches for files to change and then reruns the appropriate tests/specs/examples. Now I don’t have an excuse for not running the example suite, because it is always running for me.

active_form (http://github.com/nesquena/active_form)

Easy ActiveRecord validations for non-AR models (for those Contact Us forms).

comatose (http://github.com/darthapo/comatose)

Inevitably, every project wants to be able to manage the “static” content on the site. Comatose is a very simple CMS plugin. Nothing fancy, but that is great for these small projects. You can even style the admin interface to look more like your application (which I did), but the default styles could work just fine. It is possible to use the content in Comatose as an entire page or a partial across many pages. The app has a migration that creates some default pages and an example partial.

active_scaffold (http://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold)

Fastest way to build a super simple admin interface. Or you could use it to build more complex admin. It is really quite flexible with its search, CRUD, and the ability to customize.

display_flash_helper (http://github.com/gdagley/display_flash_helper)

Shameless use of my own plugin to display flash messages. Nothing too fancy.

exception_notification (http://github.com/rails/exception_notification)

Because they happen and I want to know about them.

pretty_buttons (http://github.com/relevance/pretty_buttons)

HTML buttons shouldn’t have to look so bad. This plugin plays nicely with Blueprint CSS buttons plugin, too

semantic_form_builder (http://github.com/nesquena/semantic_form_builder)

HTML forms made easier and semantic. Also makes the forms easier to style.

seo_helper (http://github.com/relevance/seo_helper)

A few useful helpers for SEO purposes. Create page titles (h1) that match the html title (title), support for meta tags and easily add some breadcrumbs to each page.

Conclusion

Like I said before, it is tailored to they way I like things to start out. You can fork it and change it. I may not roll you changes back in, but that’s ok because now you have an starter app just the way you like it.

I have been gradually adding new features to my StagingTracks.com website. Really, it is a place where I can try out new things outside the office. I have upgraded the UI to be a little cleaner by using the Blueprint CSS framework. It was a easy way to normalize the CSS across browsers and easily implement a column-based layout. I also added Twitter notifications when new shops, clubs, and shows are added and reminders for upcoming shows each week. Does the model railroading community really need all of this? Probably not, but it helps me keep my skillz sharp.

Finding Shops, Clubs, and Shows on your iPhone

When I built StagingTracks a few years ago, I did it because I was traveling and wanted to easily find the model railroading community wherever I was. As it has grown over the past few years, so has technology. While it was possible to navigate the StagingTracks website using a browser on the phone, it was not optimal. Since this is my little sandbox for experimenting, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to add an optimized iPhone interface.

Native app or Web app?

I spend my daylight hours developing web applications for others, so it made sense that I should reuse the infrastructure that I already had in place. I didn’t want to learn iPhone SDK and all that is involved with that right now and I had recently come across the iUi javascript and css framework. iUI can give web applications a native iPhone application feel, so I just needed to see how to incorporate it into my “legacy” Rails application.

Resources

A quick Google search for iUI and Rails turned up Ben Smith’s excellent iPhone on Rails article.

iPhoney

Reading through the article, I downloaded iPhoney for quick testing without an iPhone. Be sure to use the iPhone User Agent in the iPhoney menu.

Local Subdomain for Testing

I was going to serve the iPhone version from the subdomain iphone.stagingtracks.com, so I needed to setup something similar in my local development environment. Fortunately, this was very easy with the Ruby Ghost gem found via Robby Russell’s Get to know a gem: Ghost.

sudo ghost add iphone.localhost.com

We needed to add the .com so that the call to the request.subdomains will pick out the iphone portion.

iUI Framework

After downloading the iUI framework from the project site, I moved everything into its rightful place.

public
  - stylesheets
    - iui.css
  - javascripts
    - iui.js
  - images
    - iui
      - copy all of the .gif and .png files into here

Because I moved the images into the /images/iui folder, I needed to update the image locations in the iUI css. A quick find/replace and I was ready to go.

Application changes

I won’t go into all the details since Ben’s article hit most of the high points. Here are the few additional bits that I came across as I was adding my iPhone interface.

Basic approach

The basic approach to adding the iphone interface is to update the controller to render the iphone partial without the layout (since everything is AJAX) and then create an iphone template.

In posts_controller.rb change from:

def show
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
end  

to

UPDATE:: format.html should come before format.iphone. For some reason it was working for browsers that were not IE. Weird.

def show
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.iphone { render :layout => false }
  end
end  

iphone template posts/show.iphone.erb:

<div class="panel" title="<%= @post.title %>" selected="true">
  <h3><%= @post.title %></h3>
  <%= render :partial => 'post.html.erb', :locals => {:post => @post} %>
</div>  

Search Button

Since one of the more interesing features of StagingTracks is the ability to search for organizations near you, I wanted that to be prominent. By adding a “button” link to the toolbar, it now shows up on every page.

In application.iphone.erb:

<div class="toolbar">
  <h1 id="pageTitle"></h1>
  
  <%= link_to "Search", search_path, :class => 'button' %>
</div>

Dynamically Growing Lists (a.k.a pagination)

Since I already had paging in place for the blog posts, I wanted to be able to reuse that, if possible. Turns out that was pretty easy to add as well. I needed to separate the post_items into a separate partial so that I could return the next page of <li>'s to replace the “More news…” link (notice the target for the “More news…” link is “_replace”).

In posts/index.iphone.erb

<ul title="News" selected="true">
  <%= render :partial => 'post_items', :locals => {:posts => @posts} %>
</ul>

In posts/_post_items.iphone.erb

<% posts.each do |post| %>
  <li><%= link_to post.title, post %></li>
<% end %>
<%= content_tag :li, link_to("More news...", posts_path(:page => posts.next_page), :target => "_replace") if posts.next_page %>

A quick change in the posts_controller.rb from:

def index
  @posts = Post.latest.published.paginate :page => page, :order => 'published_at desc'
end

to:

UPDATE:: Same change to the ordering of format.html and format.iphone.

def index
  @posts = Post.latest.published.paginate :page => page, :order => 'published_at desc'
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.iphone do
      if page == 1
          render :layout => false
        else
          render :layout => false, :partial => "post_items", :locals => {:posts => @posts}
      end
    end
  end
end

Styling Form Select Inputs

My search form has a dropdown for choosing the country that you want to search. By default, this did not look very nice. Since it didn’t need a label, I just left it out in the form and added some additional CSS.

In search/index.iphone.erb

<% form_tag(search_path, :class => 'panel', :title => 'Search')  do %>
  <h2>Find Local Shops, Clubs, and Shows</h2>

  <%= content_tag :p, flash[:error], :class => 'error' if flash[:error] %>

  <fieldset>
    <div class="row">
      <%= country_select :search, :country, ['United States', 'Canada'], {} %>
    </div>  

    <div class="row">
      <label for='search_city'>City</label>
      <input type="text" value="" name="search[city]" id="search_city"/>
    </div>

    <div class="row">
      <label for='search_state'>State</label>
      <input type="text" value="" name="search[state]" id="search_state"/>
    </div>
  </fieldset>
  <%= link_to "Submit", "#", :class => 'whiteButton', :type => "submit" %>
<% end %>

And in my extra iphone.css (anything else that I needed to add to iui.css)

.row > select {
    box-sizing: border-box;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    margin: 0;
    border: none;
    padding: 0;
    height: 42px;
    background: none;
    font-size: 16px;
    width: 100%;
}

.error {
  font-weight: bold;
  color: #8a1f11;
  margin-left: 14px;
}

Conclusion

All told, I probably spent less than eight hours over a couple of nights adding a simple iPhone interface to my existing application. I still want to look in to modifying the CSS more to have it look more like the regular StagingTracks website, but that can come later. This was a fun little experiment.

Occasionally I need to mockup where the ads are going to go in an application (it has to pay for itself somehow, right?). Rather than putting the ads into the application while I am still doing development, I use some simple CSS to put a placeholder where the ads will go. In Rails, it looks like this:

<div class="ads vertical_tower">
  <% if RAILS_ENV == 'production' -%>
    <script>... Live Ad Code Goes Here </script>
  <% else -%>
    Ads Go Here
  <% end -%>
</div>

Then I can use my simple ad template CSS to make it standout. Check out the css source on Github

I am back from RailsConf 2008 and two of my favorite talks were “Microapps for Fun and Profit” by Erik Kastner and “23 Hacks” by Nathaniel Talbott. I have recently been toying around with creating small little apps where I can try out new ideas and sharpen my skills.

One of those apps is the Template Generator Pro. It was a really simple little app the generates funny cover letters, two week notices, job postings, and more. Not a lot to it. What did I learn? I deployed it to SliceHost (my previous apps have been deployed to DreamHost) and starting learning more about hosting and system administration. I also had a chance to port the Nonsense Perl script to a Ruby version. That was fun!

Tools of the Trade

What am I using for my microapps? The first ones (CathechizeMe and TemplateGeneratorPro) were small Rails applications. But that is alot of overhead and not a lot of “micro” in that. So for new things I am looking at Sinatra for a framework and Stone or ActiveRecord with SQLite for persistance. I like JQuery for the Javascript and BluePrint CSS helps me make it look pretty fairly easily. Open Source Web Design and Open Web Design help to stimulate the creative aspects of the designs.

Check it Out

You can see some my little hacks being stored on my GitHub account: http://www.github.com/gdagley. I also have some projects from work at http://www.github.com/relevance.

I came across the Yahoo! Developer Network: Design Pattern Library recently and was impressed with the number of patterns they had. It has been out for a while now, but I am just now getting back to checking it out. Definitely a useful resource.

One of the things I like about taking a project from start to finish is the first few rounds of development where we hammer out what the application is supposed to do. After reading Kathy Sierra’s article “Don’t Make the Demo Look Done“, I wanted to see if I could come up with something similar to the Napkin Look and Feel for my web applications.

Why is it important? I have found out the hard way, what Joel Spolsky points out in The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. As soon I start putting the colors, graphics, and drop shadows in place for the finished product, the attention is no longer on the functionality of the application and now turns to “could you move that button over 5 pixels?” And this is still while half the application remains unfinished!

So this is my interpretation of making the demo look like a demo. It is completely driven with a separate CSS stylesheet that can be removed and replaced with the finished stylesheet. I make use of the Yahoo CSS and some paper background images. I have even contemplated making use of the Tongue In Cheek icons to make it even more authentic. I would have used a handwriting font, but there is not a good cross browser way to deliver fonts, so Comic Sans will have to satisfy the prototype font requirement.

Here are what the initial screens look like for a new application:

• Home Page
• Sample Page
• Sample Page

Does it work?

So far it has worked great. And as soon as we switch stylesheets, we lose focus on the functionality. Every time. So I will keep using this and keep pushing this as far as a project will let me.

Because my friend Matt was so impressed with a Firefox extension I showed him, I thought I would share some of my other favorites.

What Extensions I Am Using Right Now

• Web Developer Toolbar – Just about everything you could want to do HTML and CSS, plus I can edit AND save the CSS changes I was playing around with.
• Firebug – So much goodness. Especially debugging JavaScript and looking over AJAX requests and responses.
• View Source Chart – Makes looking at HTML source bearable.
• ColorZilla – a color picker for pulling colors off of web pages.
• HTMLValidator – because it is too easy to miss a closing tag somewhere that messes everything up.
• DummyLipsum – when you need some filler content.
• SeleniumIDE – great little utility for helping to write Selenium tests for functional testing.

Not to mention

• Adblock – no more ads.
• Adblock Filterset.G – no more ads just got easier.
• GTDInbox – for when I think that I am Getting Things Done
• Foxmarks – because I have too many computers and too many bookmarks.

Got a favorite? I’d like to hear about it.

With all of the talk these days of Web 2.0 and the fancy, shiny, draggable, refreshable, blinking, glowing components in web applications, I wonder how many of the will still work when JavaScript is turn off or not even present (yes, it still happens). And how is the usability and accessibility of the application affected when so much of the interaction happens through JavaScript that doesn’t degrade?

I have been taking a look at creating a fully functional application, without any fancy Javascipt or AJAX, and then adding the extra functionality unobtrusively. To force myself to learn how to do this, I stopped using Prototype, script.aculo.us, and the Ruby on Rails helpers with RJS, and I started using JQuery. Two things happened: 1. I started to better understand how AJAX works and can enhance my application. 2. I found out I really like JQuery.

More on my JQuery experiences later. Now back to adding cool features, unobtrusively.

I wanted to mention a simple little tool that has saved me hours. The Yahoo! UI CSS Foundation is actually three separate CSS files: Reset, Fonts, and Grids.

Reset removes all of the default styling from the browser. Even with out add a stylesheet to you website, the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari) has already add some default styles. This is why headers are bigger and bolder than text in a paragraph. But, amazingly enough, the default styles vary from browser to browser. Reset CSS is great because it removes all of the default styling and let me, the developer/designer, go and set the style that I want. I can be sure that some default style won’t creep in and ruin a good design.

Where Reset removes all of the default styling, the Fonts CSS sets a level playing field and uniform approach to font sizing. With the various ways to size fonts (px, pt, em, %), it shouldn’t be any suprise that once again the various web browser handle these differently. The Fonts CSS gives you a uniform way of setting the base size of the document and adjusting all other font sizes as a percentage of the base size. It turns out that, while requiring a little bit of math, this is super easy and keeps things looking good.

While I start every project with the Reset and Fonts CSS, it is the Grids CSS that really is the time saver. Now that using tables for layouts is so 1990’s, coming up with cross-browser compatable grid layouts can be a challenge. When you combine it with the decisions of fixed-width or fluid layouts, sidebar positioning on the left or the right, semantic markup, and search engine optimization, grid layouts can make you scream and run. The Grids CSS gives you three tools in one: fixed-width or fluid layouts, sidebar size and positioning, and grids. I won’t get into all the details, but you can play with the Yahoo! Grid Builder or check out some of my latest projects to see it in action.

To top it all off, there is one combined file that is compressed and includes all three CSS components. All you have to do is add a link tag pointing to the latest version and you are off and running. Now you can focus on more important things, like making your application functional.