Alex Bradbury has developed Ariel, a library that uses predefined examples to work out how to extract information from other documents. It was a Google Summer of Code project and was mentioned by Austin Ziegler. More directly from Alex:
>> story.description = "Peter flippin' _Cooper_" => "Peter flippin' _Cooper_" >> story.description => "<p>Peter flippin’ <em>Cooper</em></p>" >> story.textiled = false => false >> story.description => "Peter flippin' _Cooper_"
Chris Wanstrath has created acts_as_textiled, a new plugin for Rails that allows you to specify columns on your model to be automatically parsed as Textile content.
Hiveminds Magazine has a long article about using Ruby's DBI library to connect to databases, along with installation instructions.
Some readers have checked out the little publicized chatroom that's always been linked to from Ruby Inside, but it's been really flaky. Luckily, however, new Web 2.0 startup, Lingr, provide an absolutely amazing, fast, and easy to use chatroom and I've set it up for Ruby Inside right away.
Ruby Inside is running a $100 contest for people who write a Ruby or Rails related article, resource post, or tutorial this week. There's still just over 24 hours left to run so get your entries in quickly if you want a chance at winning the $100. So far there have been 16 entries and they're all pretty good. But.. there are only two entries for the second prize so far, so if you want some great odds at winning the $15 second prize, link to the contest and let us know about it!
Geoffrey Grosenbach looks at how to use memcached, a fast in-memory caching daemon, from Ruby and Rails to speed up common repeated data operations, including ActiveRecord lookups. He also includes a useful install script and patch for Mac OS X users to make memcached fly on that platform. He also demonstrates the use of the cached_model gem to significantly speed up database reads from Rails applications.
ar_mailer is a system that automatically queues outgoing mails from Rails applications (using ActionMailer) by placing them into a special database table, to then be handled by a separate process, ar_sendmail. This could be particularly ideal for systems with mass mailing applications or simply as a method to speed up certain requests in your Rails applications since only a single database write is required rather than waiting for an e-mail to finish sending.
