Mark A. McBride has put together a great article about processing credit cards with Ruby on Rails using the Active Merchant plugin.

In case the title of this post is giving you deja-vu, we've looked at "How To Create A Ruby Extension In C" before at Ruby Inside. We've also looked at using RubyInline to make the process even faster by not having to write a specialized C extension.

It's good to start seeing those Rails 1.2 guides coming out of the woodwork. Hopefully I'll get able to do a roundup of them shortly, but for now Andre Lewis presents a quick, practical guide to nesting CRUD resources in Rails 1.2.

SyntaxHighlighter is a WordPress plugin that provides code presentation and syntax highlighting features for your blog (if it's WordPress powered, naturally!). It supports a plethora of languages such as C, C++, C#, HTML, and PHP, as well as Ruby. On my blogs so far I've tended to use a homebrew approach with the Syntax gem, but this WordPress plugin should make it a whole lot easier in the future. If you're a WordPress powered blogger who likes to post code snippets, check it out.

No editorial on this, as I want to get it out quick, and I know some readers aren't subscribers to the official Rails blog.. but.. Rails 1.2 has just been released! Or, more accurately, Rails 1.2.1, as the obligatory bug-fix release followed on a little more quickly than usual :) You might want to get it straight away before the servers melt down with the rush tomorrow. Just use gem install rails --include-dependencies as usual.

In Concerns in ActiveRecord, Jamis Buck writes about a simple technique of using modules to mix in functionality shared by multiple models without resorting to STI. This technique has been possible in Rails since.. ever, but I must admit I'd never considered it before, so I'm sure a lot of people will find it useful.