Robby on Rails

After announcing RubyURL (almost 200 URLs in 12 hours!), I saw a thread on RubyTalk discussing TinyURL and saw a post from Friday..where someone suggested the idea of a site called, rubyurl.net!

Here’s the weird part. I subscribed to RubyTalk yesterday (Sunday morning) and never saw that thread, never saw that suggestion..and somehow, I came up with this idea to build RubyURL.com last night (as a let’s see if I can do it in a hour’ type of project).

However, now that I just saw the thread, I feel like I unknowingly took someones idea and ran with it..without ever knowing it. heh.

As I just said on RubyTalk, the world works in strange ways…

heading to bed.. (finally)

A few people thought they were funny. heh

I’ll work on adding some better error checking tomorrow. I just happen to know how to do it quicker in PostgreSQL.

ALTER TABLE rubyurls ADD CONSTRAINT url_exclude 
CHECK ( 
    website_url !~ 'goatse' AND 
    website_url !~ 'rubyurl.com' AND 
    website_url !~ 'tubgirl');

Ok, I will admit it. I spent much longer than a hour on this. I spent about a hour coding, testing and adding a few CSS tags to the few pages. I spent a few hours trying to figure out why my RewriteRule was not working.

At about 10pm on Sunday evening, I had an idea… hey, I’ll spend the rest of the night on a simple Rails project… and after being sent a link for a tinyurl, I thought, Hey, I’ll just create RubyURL.com. So, I checked godaddy.com, the domain was available and I will now own it until this time next year.

The system thus far comprises of 1 database table, 2 controllers and 1 model that were added to the default rails install. (not including the Rails templates for new.rhtml and show.rhtml).

The random character string function that I used is here: This allos me to create some random alpha-numeric string like ur029

class Rubyurl < ActiveRecord::Base

  def self.gen_random(size=5)
    chars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890" 
    short_url = "" 
    srand
    size.times do
      pos = rand(chars.length)
      short_url += chars[pos..pos]
    end
    short_url
  end

end

So, with the standard usage of scaffold I was able to create a random string prior to saving my form:

  def create
    @rubyurl = Rubyurl.new(@params['rubyurl'])
    @rubyurl['short_url'] = Rubyurl.gen_random(5)
    if @rubyurl.save
      flash['notice'] = 'Rubyurl was successfully created.'
      redirect_to :action => 'show', :id => @rubyurl.id
    else
      render_action 'new'
    end
  end

The last part in the ruby code was to make it actually redirect to another location:

class GoController < ApplicationController

  scaffold :rubyurl

  def go
  end

  def index
    @url = Rubyurl.find_first(["short_url = ?", @params["id"]])
    if @url['website_url']
      redirect_to @url['website_url']
    end
  end

end

... so just over 2 1/2 hours later (mainly due to a problem with the RewriteRule..), I am now happy to announce the alpha release of RubyURL.

I’ll write more about my findings when I wake up.. off to bed.

I am working on migrating an existing system that utilizes MD5 rather than SHA1 for password encryption so I needed to make a few adjustments to the login process.

I had issued the following command which created some objects to work with.

./script/generate login User

My existing system also uses the email address as the login username, so I modified the the file ./app/models/user.rb:

I changed this:

  def self.sha1(pass)
    Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("---changme--#{pass}--")
  end

to:

  def self.md5(pass)
    Digest::MD5.hexdigest("--my-salt--#{pass}")
  end

Then I went and changed instances of sha1 in user.rb to md5.

The next step was to modify the field that authentication was checking the database with.

I changed this:

  def self.authenticate(login, pass)
    find_first(["login = ? AND password = ?", login, sha1(pass)])
  end

to this:

  def self.authenticate(login, pass)
    find_first(["email = ? AND password = ?", login, md5(pass)])
  end

The last step was to modify the table that the system looks in for the users who can login to the system. Still in user.rb, I added this to the top of the User class.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

def self.table_name() "employees" end

...
end

Playing around with the template a bit. (css and the header image..)

When you run BloGTK and Typo together, make sure you set the API to MoveableType in your Preferences.

..and a screenshot of me posting this entry.