Elsewhere

RailsForum.com has just announced the winners of their October Tutorial Contest. A lot of cool tutorials came out of the contest, so I wanted to link to them here.

1st place - HOWTO: Make a Rails Plugin From Scratch by Danger Stevens.

2nd place - Refactoring on Rails: Move to Model and Refactoring on Rails: Multiple Scopes in Controller by Ryan Bates.

3rd place - HOWTO: Send Instant Messages in Rails

Other entries
Image uploads and resizing for Rails models with mini-magick
XSS and when h() just ain't enough
Creating Two Models in One Form
Editing Multiple Models in One Form
Test Helper: Clean, Custom Assertion Messages
Debugging on Rails: Reading Stack Traces
Introduction to Form Helpers
Programming Best Practices
Advice to Rails Beginners: Follow Conventions
Handy RJS Tips
Using Autotest with Rails on Windows XP machines
Creating Many Models in One Form
Creating a Variable Number of Models in One Form
Getting Started With RESTful Rails
Rails Migration For Beginners

Ruby genius Mauricio Fernandez has been playing with an attempt at processing Prolog using Ruby found on a Japanese coding site and has come up with tiny_prolog.rb.

I don't think the Ruby Jobs site at RubyNow gets enough link love from the community, and I want to put that right. If you haven't been there for a while, you'll be surprised. In just the last two weeks there are 30 new Ruby and Rails jobs available. That's even more than on the 37signals Jobs Board. Even better, if you're an employer you can post to the RubyNow jobs board for free, so check it out.

The winners of the Rails Day have been announced. For those who haven't heard about it before, Rails Day is an annual contest in which hundreds of developers take 24 hours to develop an application.

Merb is a micro-framework (developed by Ezra Zygmuntowicz) that ties in with Mongrel and erb and provides basic controller and view templating. It's an ideal way to put together quick and simple Web applications with Ruby that don't rely on any of the fancier features offered by Rails. It does have support for ActiveRecord, however. Merb allows you to create small systems that produce dynamic requests and can interact with databases but without the significant weight of the Rails framework. Where Ruby on Rails is a Big Mac, Merb is a McNugget.