imedo Development Blog

If you’re using XHTML 1.0 Transitional, care about validity and want to integrate open graph in your pages, you may have, like myself, noticed that the meta tags they suggest are invalid. Specifically, ‘property’ is an invalid attribute. Before you dive down the rabbit hole of DTDs and DOCTYPES, allow me to spare you some [...]

We started using git in late 2008 mainly not because it was cool but because it solved one particiular problem: Slow deployment. To understand this you have to know that our codebase was rather big and monolithic back then. One big rails project with a lot of small files and lots of plugins. This meant [...]

Here is something for people concerned of their websites health. A new tool called TinyMon enables you to test your website from an users perspective unattended and continuously.

You can simply check if that website of yours is still online, or test more complex stuff like online shop transactions or sign up-processes that require clicking an activation link mail send to an applicants mailbox. If you have used Selenium, Webrat or Waitir before, then usage of TinyMon will be a breeze.

The great thing about TinyMon is, compared to Selenium, Webrat&Co: You can get all of the functionality and continuos checking power for zero set-up effort for the Framework. Oh, did I mention that it is free…?

Most people ask us why we use background_lite at all, as it doesn’t provide any background job functions itself. Why do you use ActiveRecord and not plain SQL? Abstraction? Exactly! The goal of background_lite is to abstract the interface of background handling and let you configure the actual background layer. We’ve been using active_messaging for [...]

If you need a quick overview whether the internal links of your website are working and the markup is valid, checkout the Multipage Validator tool.

With Cucumber 0.4 the API for the output formatters has been changed. We updated our output formatter according to these changes. It is now compatible with Cucumber versions 0.4.x to 0.6.x. The the updated code can be found here: imedo_ci_formatter.rb

Nice approach for circumventing input validation for JSON: Parameter Pollution with JSON. Be sure to have your input validation handle this kind of injection attacks.

Most web applications depend on user name password combinations in order to authorize user access. Hence one of the biggest security problems in the world wide web are weak passwords. Users choose easy to guess password because they are easy to remember. In this article some hints are given which should help choosing a good [...]

We’re pretty much a Mac shop here at imedo and, as our application is built using Ruby on Rails, it’s safe to say that we are legally obliged to use TextMate for all our editing needs . One of the features I love about TextMate, catered for in most bundles, is the ability to execute [...]

Another short tip, because I really like the smusher gem! first install it: gem install smusher then crush your images automatically using the PunyPng service, which is currently delivering the best results in terms of file size: smusher * –service PunyPng