Musings of a Trained Monkey

I’ve added a little AJAX Accordion to my sidebar. You may have noticed I have a fasicination with where vistors to my site are located, geographically speaking. I will probably be posting an updated Google Analytics map in the next few days just to show my progress towards world domination.

Imagine my surprise to discover that while my good friends from Iceland have finally arrived (þakka þú), I haven’t even completed penetration of the entire United States!

As you can see from the new Visitors Sidebar there are nine seven states holding out on me. I would like to take this opportunity to see if anyone out there knows anyone from the University of Alaska – Fairbanks or University of Alaska – Anchorage, if so tell them to avoid further shaming Alaska by visiting me!

To digress for a moment, seriously Norway, what is the deal? I have been getting a lot of traffic from Finland, Sweden, and even Denmark, but you continue to elude my grasp and so now a special plea:

Norge hvorfor vil ikke du komme til besøk meg for www.stevelongdo.com? Er den språkbarrieren? Til tross forJEG er for gammel å delta JEG ville elske å besøk Oslo i løpet av Kanskje når det ‘russ’ festen er under utvikling.

For my English readers that is a little something like this:

Norway why won’t you come to visit me at www.stevelongdo.com? Is it the language barrier? Although I am too old to participate I would love to visit Oslo during May when the ‘russ’ celebration is in progress.

UPDATE: I picked up two states already! Welcome aboard South Dakota and Kansas. I will allow the sun to resume shining there immediately.

UPDATE2: I’ve received reports that the AJAX Accordion doesn’t like IE 6 or otherwise messes up the alignment of my content? I only tested with real browsers and it worked great with them. I don’t have a Windoze box at home so I will check it out tomorrow at work…

UPDATE3: I found documentation on this problem here and implemented a fix So the 12% of users browsing my site in IE can now see the text of the articles lined up correctly again. Seriously though join the other 88% of visitors using real browsers you can even use this one

People that have worked with me in the past know how much I think unit tests are worth. In fact I won't say any more about them. White box testing has a place, it just isn't on my blog.

Selenium is an open source testing framework that will be making products like Mercury Interactive's WinRunner quake in their boots. Being able to do acceptance/functional/regression/Black Box testing of web applications across browser and OS platform boundaries from a single script file is already possible with Selenium. The major testing/QA vendors can't even boast that level of functionality yet. Even better AJAX applications are supported by Selenium. There is a Selenium IDE that works as an extension to Firefox. You can simply record your actions "macro-like" as you navigate through the web application you want to test.

What makes this all the more exciting is the recent selenium_on_rails plugin. It allows you to embed and run your Selenium tests as rake tasks. Automated quality assurance has never been this compelling to include as part of the development process.

So far the only short coming I've observed is the lack of i18n support, however the new .rsel format probably could be used to overcome this. Rsel lets you define your Selenium tests in terms of Ruby code. To see all of this in action take a look at the excellent screencast over at and then nothing.net.

UPDATE: Someone made a good point that I maybe didn't make clear here, Selenium can be used to test ANY web application, not just Rails powered, but even legacy Java, .NET, PHP, or any other caveman languages from the last century. :-)

I've gotten quite a bit done on rating. Models can now use the act_as_rateable plugin to track rating information. I've written ActionView Helpers to implement a star rating system and a very cool 1..10 style bar. I've done some preliminary studying of integration with the sciptaculous_slider rails plugin as well.

Remaining todo items include:

• Rake task to copy images the helpers use to public/images directory.
• Rake task to setup database tables for storing rating info.
• Convert the SQL file I've been using into a Migrations style script.
• Increase Unit Testing coverage.
• Tying in a rate method on ActionControllers...

This last item is giving me pause though. I was wanting to include a simple rating_controller with the plugin and have it automatically register its route via the init.rb file. I sought out help from the Rails mailing list, but no one could help helped. I may pursue a rake task for adding the route into the routes.rb file. I think this isn't nearly as cool as self-registering a route within the init.rb file, but I haven't had any luck with the methods I have tried so far.