Ruby Studio Blog

If you've been using jQuery Mobile from the start or if you're just beginning to play with it (beta 3 is current at the time of this writing) you might have noticed that in recent versions auto-resizing of page elements does not work for all devices out of the box and this was not the case in earlier versions. The answer is simple, but not well documented (if at all): you need to add the viewport meta tag in your layout:

If you happen to use non-ASCII characters in a ruby file within your rails app, say a controller, library, database seeds, etc, you might have the invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII) error thrown at you by ruby 1.9.x. This is something you're bound to experience if you're developing an app that is localized in a language that utilizes non-ASCII characters and you're not using the i18n libraries of rails to define your strings. The solution is very easy and feels almost magical:

# encoding: utf-8

Having a sitemap for your website is a nice convention, it helps search engines find, index and build an hierarchy of your pages and it also gives you some control of what content is parsed and how often. At Ruby Studio we regard sitemaps as a mandatory aspect of development and SEO and always include them in the apps we build, even if it's a simple app with no much dynamic content, such as our current [homepage](http://rubystudio.net/). So what is our preferred method of incorporating sitemaps in rails applications? There is a really easy way, by using a gem that is actively maintained and fully compatible with rails 3.1. As an extra benefit, the gem is really well documented. It's called [sitemap_generator](http://rubygems.org/gems/sitemap_generator). Here's how to get going with it in a few easy steps: * Add `gem 'sitemap_generator'` to your Gemfile and run bundle. This will install the gem * Run `rake sitemap:install` to setup the gem. This will generate a `config/sitemap.rb` file which is your sitemap configuration descriptor file. You can run this task on your development machine and there will be no need to repeat the process for production. * Open your sitemap.rb file to define the pages you need included in your sitemap. Only the root home pages is included by default. In your sitemap.rb file you'' find initially a block of code: `SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = "http://www.example.com"` `SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do` ........ `end` * Edit the file, inserting into the block the links to your pages or resources like this:

SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = "http://www.example.com" SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do add '/contact_us' Content.find_each do |content| add content_path(content), :lastmod => content.updated_at end end

As you can see from the example, static pages are added by a simple `add` declaration, and dynamic content can be easily added by a nested block selector, polling your rails models and extracting blogs, articles or any other dynamic assets you might have in your app. Neat and easy! There are a number of supporter options you can add to your configuration to fine tune the crawling frequency, priority, etc, such as `add '/contact_us', :changefreq => 'monthly'` `add '/about', :priority => 0.75` The full list is available in [the gem documentation](http://rdoc.info/github/kjvarga/sitemap_generator/master/frames) * After writing the configuration, you're ready to actually generate your sitemaps. Run `rake sitemap:refresh`. This will create the sitemaps and put them in your `public/` folder, appropriately compressing them with gzip and naming them by default: `sitemap_index.xml.gz, sitemap1.xml.gz`, etc * Next you should add the path to your sitemap in your `robots.txt` file, so that the spiders can find it automatically: `Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml.gz` * Upon a sitemap generation, the script automatically notifies (pings) major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, SitemapWriter) that a new sitemap is available. In development you can disable the notification by using instead `rake sitemap:refresh:no_ping` * That's all, you're now ready to rumble with your new shiny sitemaps. In production you can add a crontab entry (either manually, or using the [whenever](http://rubygems.org/gems/whenever) gem) for the rake task to automatically re-generate your sitemaps on, say, a daily basis. Here's an example of raw crontab entry: `0 5 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /path/to/webapp && RAILS_ENV=production rake -s sitemap:refresh --silent'` Or an example `whenever` entry:

# config/schedule.rb every 1.day, :at => '5:00 am' do rake "-s sitemap:refresh" end

We've launched the initial version of our website today. It has pretty basic functionality right now, and we regard it as merely the surface layer of a system that will eventually let us manage and administer our customers and their projects with ease and convenience. So much of what is planned is actually irrelevant to the general audience and will remain invisible in the public section of the site. Some important public sections though are still incomplete and we will focus on bringing them up in the following days. These are the portfolio and testimonials listings, the FAQ section and the IP.Trac pages which are perhaps the most important for us right now, since IP.Trac is currently our flagman product and it still lacks consistent documentation and user-friendly manual, even though it's been used in production by ISPs for more than a year now, The fact of the matter is we needed web presence and we needed it quickly, to match the speed with which RubyStudio transitioned from a loosely linked group of individuals working occasionally together on random projects to a real company with its own face and branding.