Robby on Rails

Earlier today, Vincent Foley was kind enough to hand over maitenance of the the ShortURL project on RubyForge to me. He first released it back in 2005, which I blogged about as RubyURL was the first shortening service that it supported (and is the default). Unfortunately, the release of RubyURL 2.0 broke backwards compatibility and Vincent wasn’t maintaining it anymore. So, earlier, I decided to patch this and got a new version released that now works with the current RubyURL site.

While working on the code, I decided to extend the compatible services to include moourl and urlTea.

These updates are available in ShortURL version 0.8.4.

Install the ShortURL gem

Installation is a snap… (like 99.7% of rubygems…)

  ~ > sudo gem install shorturl                                                                                                                                                                                                           Password:

  Successfully installed shorturl-0.8.4
  1 gem installed
  Installing ri documentation for shorturl-0.8.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for shorturl-0.8.4.  

Using ShortURL

The ShortURL gem provides the ShortURL library, which you can use from any Ruby application.

Using the ShortURL library

  ~ > irb                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
  => true
  irb(main):002:0> require 'shorturl'
  => true
  irb(main):003:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com' )
  => "http://rubyurl.com/P9w" 

As you can see…it’s really straight forward.

Let’s try it with a few other services.

irb(main):004:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :moourl )
=> "http://moourl.com/fvoky" 
irb(main):005:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :tinyurl )
=> "http://tinyurl.com/2t3qmh" 

Using the shorturl command-line tool

Many people don’t know that ShortURL provides a command-line tool, which you can use after installing the gem.

  ~ > shorturl http://istwitterdown.com                                                                                                                                                                                               
  http://rubyurl.com/Lwk

If you’d like to see more services provided than the ones listed here, please submit feature requests and/or patches on the rubyforge project.

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

ShortURL Documentation

To see the latest documentation for the project, please visit:

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

My favorite part about this? My rbot plugin for RubyURL works again!

Happy URL-shortening!

Hey! You’re a cheater!

Well, if you’re not… I’m hoping to make one out of you.

“A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”—W. C. Fields

I’m a fan of the PDF cheat sheets as I like the consolidated content contained in them. However, I don’t like having to read PDFs any more than I have to. Printing them isn’t always ideal either as I really don’t like to carry around extra paper in my laptop bag. So, what are we to do?

Well, you can cheat the system! ...and I’m going to show you how!

Cheat is this really nice command-line tool that outputs a plain text cheat sheet whenever and wherever you want.

Install the Cheat

Like all the happy and good Rubygems, this is quite simple…

$ sudo gem install cheat

Done! Okay… let’s try to do some cheating. Don’t worry, your friends and family will forgive you.

Becoming a Cheat(er)

To view a cheat sheet, just run the cheat command from your favorite terminal window.

$ cheat _cheat name_

So, for example… to see the cheat sheet for RSpec, run cheat rspec.

    $ cheat rspec
    rspec:
      INSTALL
      =======
      $ sudo gem install rspec

      $ ./script/plugin install
      svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/REL_X_Y_Z/vendor/rspec_on_rails/vendor/p
      ugins/rspec
      Where X_Y_Z is the version number.

      $ ./script/generate rspec
            create  spec
            create  spec/spec_helper.rb
            create  spec/test2spec.erb
            create  test/test2spec_help.rb
            create  script/rails_spec
            create  script/rails_spec_runner

      HOW TO USE
      ==========
      ./script/generate rspec_model User

####################################################
# truncated to save precious bandwidth
####################################################

Because this is all printing out in your shell, you can take advantage of your favorite command line tools.

Piping to grep

$ cheat rspec | grep 'equal' 
      @user.errors.on(:username).should_equal "is required" 
  target.should_equal <value>
  target.should_not_equal <value>

Piping to TextMate

$ cheat rspec | mate

Find more Cheats

Head over to this list of cheats to see what is currently available.

Thanks to the Err team for putting this together!