I happened to be looking for a better way to show a preview of my web albums when I came across Prototype-UI which is a suite of user-interface components. Their carousel component was just want I need to spruce up my site design. The only problem was that documentation on the site is quite sparse and it took me a while to get things sorted out.

Deciding upon a navigation system is probably one of the most important choices in website design. The navigation system can make or break a sites usability. Because of the importance a good navigation system plays, I choose to ignore the many available Rails menu plugins and roll out my own so that it would work exactly as I needed it. In this tutorial, I will detail how to use the Rails plugin acts_as_nested_set to create your own dynamic navigation system.

After I implemented LaTeX rendering into my views, I was quite satisfied with how it came out. LaTeX can now be effortless inserted into a field that is textile enabled with very good results. But then I began to look at the code snippits and I realized how ugly they look when compared to the rest of the site. I did a quick web search for ways to incorporate syntax highlighting in Rails applications, but I wasn’t really satisfied with what I found. Then the solution smacked me in the face. Just extend RedCloth!

RedCloth is Ruby’s Textile module. Textile is a lightweight markup language originally developed by Dean Allen that allows a user to create well-formed styled XHTML. This site employes the RedCloth Textile module through the acts_as_textiled plugin. The nice thing about RedCloth is it is faily easy to extend the markup which it recognies. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to render [latex]\LaTeX{}[/latex] in your site by extending RedCloth.

While SCM can seem like a really boring topic, if you develop code you need a SCM. it is one of the most valuable programming tools. One of the newest SCM’s is Git, which was largely inspired by the BitKeeper revision control software. It is the SCM of choice for a large number of big name projects in the open source community, most notably the Linux Kernel, and has recently become a hot topic in the Rails community with the advent of Github. While Git alone alone offers some attractive benefits over SVN it really beings to shine with combined with Github.