Installing a Rails plugin from a github branch

Today I wanted to install a plugin from github into a rails project. So far so good, you would think. You only need to run script/plugin install and start coding right away.

Unfortunately, the branch of the plugin I need is not the master one, because this applications runs on rails 2.3.x and the master branch has been adapted to rails 3 already.

I could just download the tar file from github, or I could make a git clone and checkout the branch I wanted.. but it turns out I don’t need to do any of those, because old good script/plugin has an option to checkout a specific branch

script/plugin install http://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git -r 2-3-stable

And I can start coding right away.. and that’s exactly what I’m going to do after publishing this post.

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SEO for developers

As a web developer, my work involves much more than just coding; many times I find myself covering topics such as user experience, scalability, reliability of the system, or metrics and analytics to track the acceptance of a site.

SEO is left many times on the hands of the marketing team, but there are many technical aspects that are important in order to make a site appealing both for visitors and searchbots. Since web technologies (and search engines) evolve quickly, if you want to have a good site you need to keep posted about the latest developments. Sadly, there are a lots of materials based on outdated information and there are many myths and legends around the topic

I have been following closely the status of web crawling and indexing for some years, and we have been applying with success many of the practices I’ve learned to improve the sites of some clients. None of these practices involved links from external sites or bought traffic, just a better structure and changes of the contents and the sites’ internals.

Since we want to follow these practices in all the projects we are taking, I decided to prepare an internal training session for the ASPgems’ development team.

Here are the slides for my presentation. Even if they are not as good without the explanation (sorry, no video this time), I hope you’ll find them useful. UPDATE: video -in Spanish- has been uploaded to the media page of my blog.

This material is published under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.5

If you find it interesting or if you are going to use it for any purposes, I’d appreciate an e-mail to jramirez@formatinternet.com