This post is a follow on from my previous post about the oAuth protocol in general in Ruby. Here I detail how to let a user authenticate themselves via Twitter to your web app, request a list of people they’re following (a GET operation) and how to follow a specific user (a POST operation). As […]
2011
oAuth with the Twitter API in Ruby on Rails without a gem
15th December, 2011 - Posted by david
oAuth 1.0 in Ruby without a gem
10th December, 2011 - Posted by david
Recently I decided to figure out what the oAuth 1.0 protocol was all about and try to implement it in Ruby, as part of a way a) to practice by Ruby on Rails, b) have a look at the Twitter API and c) use both to get an understanding of how websites let you log […]
Favourite Interview Process
16th September, 2011 - Posted by david
Last month I resigned my post from daft.ie and am about to take up a development position with dotMobi, a leading mobile Internet services company. I had done interviews with several places, while reading plenty of articles on various other companies’ hiring practices. At the end of these couple of months, I came to the […]
MySQL reached max integer limit
23rd August, 2011 - Posted by david
Whenever anything generates a MySQL error at work, the whole technical team gets an email about it, with full debug info. We recently got one for an area that I look after, so it was up to me to investigate. The title of the error was a slightly cryptic Error: Duplicate entry ‘0’ for key […]
jQuery Mobile and Dynamic Data
23rd May, 2011 - Posted by david
UPDATE: I’ve recently been asked by entertainment.ie to stop scraping thier licensed data, to which I’ve duly agreed. Thus, the app is no longer live. However, the lessons learned below are still valid. END Haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been busy trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails, so haven’t created anything […]
Regular expression (regex) to remove double encoding of html entities
30th March, 2011 - Posted by david
When you have users copying and pasting in data to forms on your website, which then gets stored in your database, you invariably end up with all sorts of ways of encoding and storing special characters. Ideally, these will end up in your database as the correct characters (such as € for the euro symbol), […]
Google Maps Zoom Control missing in Internet Explorer (IE): a solution
23rd February, 2011 - Posted by david
When I was working on rebuilding daft.ie’s mapping system for the modern web, it involved writing alot of Javascript (JS) code and loading this via a couple of JS source files, one external one from Google (i.e. the core Google Maps JS) and another from our own web-servers. It all worked fine in most browsers, […]
Planned site downtime: how to handle it with PHP
25th January, 2011 - Posted by david
Today I read an interesting article on Google’s Webmaster Central blog about planned down time, for maintenance or whatever. Basically, you need to communicate to users and potential site-crawlers/indexers that the site is down, but it’s ok, it’ll be back up soon! My suggestion would be to do a mod-rewrite (if using Apache, but other […]