Caffeine

Here are the top blog posts from 2009 based on number of web visits. We write about Rails, web development, CSS, design, web marketing and product updates. Development and Rails tips are the clear winners in popularity.

1. Why We Chose 960.gs for Our CSS Framework

A few months back, we redesigned Onehub.com to coincide with the public launch of the Onehub service. There were a ton of goals to achieve with the new design from education, sales and marketing perspectives. I also had my own hidden agenda which resulted in us implementing a CSS framework.

2. Using Godaddy SSL Certificates with NGINX

Have you just installed your new Godaddy certificate into your NGINX web server, and are you finding that some browsers (notably Safari) don’t trust your website when using your Godaddy SSL Certificate? This is manifest by the error message “Safari can’t identify the identity of the website ‘your.url.here’” and is caused by the “chain of trust” being incomplete between your certificate and any of the root certificates that your browser client has installed.

3. Buildmeister: Managing your build process using Lighthouse and Git

As with any web company, we’re constantly honing our development and deployment process. Recently, we moved to Lighthouse – we were already using Git, but the convergence of the two has finally crystallized our workflow into something that, we feel, works really nicely.

4. Rails Maintenance Pages Done Right

A maintenance page is a common feature in a rails deployment. This feature enables the developers to put their application into “maintenance mode”, returning 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) and a helpful page that describes what is happening and when the user can expect service to resume.

5. Decorating ActiveRecord Accessor Methods

Recently, I was faced with a quandary. I needed to impart some of our ActiveRecord accessor methods with special functionality, but I also needed to maintain the default behavior for those fields. This was done to support a new input type which we added to the venerable CalendarDateSelect plugin which allows a user to enter a date, time, and meridian, all in separate fields.