“…you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valor, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.”

Funeral Oration of Pericles
read it: (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pericles.htm)
hear it: (http://ia600306.us.archive.org/28/items/nonfiction002_librivox/funeralorationpericles_thucydides_mlc.mp3)
read about it on wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles’_Funeral_Oration)

Within our organization we use video hosted on Vimeo to stream our media as it is both an awesome and cost effective service.

The rub is that the users of my apps would much rather have an easy way to embed their videos rather than embed using the available CKEditor embed function, as embed code can pretty scary to end users and using the new iframe embed method made video from Vimeo and Youtube available on iphone/ipad/etc.

So I reengineered the embed plugin to let an end user embed a Vimeo video to their content by only providing the Vimeo video’s id. By adding the vimeo plugin to the CKEditor config, and including Vimeo in your toolbar definition you now have a shiny vimeo button:

By clicking on the Vimeo icon the user receives the following dialog box:

After entering the id and OK the video is embedded in the content. Power users can then modify widths, and other settings.

Oh and as you may have noticed above I have done the same for ‘Youtube’ as well.
Just call on plugin youtube and use Youtube to get the shiny Youtube button and embed function.

They are a bit rough but at the moment they get the job done. Feed back is very much appreciated.
vimeo plugin (zip) | youtube plugin (zip)

Update:
You may have to first click on the editor window for the embed to work. as it needs to know where you want to place the video. I will look into adding a focus so this is not necessary.

As a side note if you are using the plugin on an https domain you may want to update the vimeo URL to “https://secure/vimeo.com/…” and YouTube to “https://youtube.com/…” to avoid scary errors in IE and missing content in the editor.

It just seems that nearly half of the world cling to axioms of the past and almost all the rest snicker at the latter, celebrating nothingness. A slim group that falls in between the two are equally in love with science and in awe of this universe that with Socratic insight will not make assumptions either way. Learn to embrace the idea that you could be wrong and your world opens up.

I always dreaded creating image headers for websites, but always saw the headers as the perfect place to add style and tie the content to the design. Then along came SiFR(www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr). I could now embed font in flash and use java script to call upon all the font, and css to provide additional style. Life was very good, besides the sporadic issues with the font not showing up in certain Microsoft browsers, have you heard of them.

But today I again revisited text-replacement and found typeface.js. It is just awesome and strictly a javascript based tool. I just used it for the first time on http://burningtreecellars.com, and it ease of implementation is astounding. If you are on the hunt for a standard based tool for text replacement, I can do nothing but highly recommend it.

Take it for a spin: Typeface.js (http://typeface.neocracy.org/)

Disclaimer: I have yet to run it through the gauntlet of browsers to verify cross browser compatibility but will keep you posted if weirdness rears its ugly head


select username,count(*) as n
from users
group by username
having n > 1;


or search by first and last name:


select concat(firstname,' ',lastname) as name, count(*) as n
from users
group by name
having n > 1;


I am writing this post as I scoured page after page with out luck and came up with this solution.  Others may already be all over this method or have more eloquent solutions but there people didn’t have their content search engine optimized.  So for those in need here ya go.

I have used observe_field on occasion in great success to update select form elements in form_for and form_tags but ran into trouble an when trying to have one text_fields value influence the value of another text_fields.

The Goal

I wanted to auto populate the city in a text_field  based on the zip code information provided  in the text_field above.  With the city and zip code I am planning  to build a layered Google maps component ( but that is for a later post).  For now if the city could pre-populate based on zipcode provided, and allow for corrections if the user wanted to put in a different city, then I win….  streamers and confetti fall from the ceiling.

What Didn’t Work

<p>
<%= f.label :zipcode, “Zip code” %>: <%= f.text_field :zipcode, :size=>’8′ %>
</p>

<p>
<%= f.label :city, “City (change if zip code lookup is incorrect): ” -%><%= f.text_field :city -%>
</p>

<%= observe_field ‘community_zipcode’,:method => :get,:frequency => 0.25,:update => ‘community_city’,:url => {:controller=>’communities’,:action => ‘getcity’},:with => “zipcode” -%>

Notice above that I tried to reference the DOM id of the text_field I was interested in updating directly.  It did not work as I wished so I moved on to plan B.

Plan B

Plan B involved creating a partial ‘_city_lookup.html.erb’ with contents:

<label for=”community_city”>City (change if zip code lookup is incorrect):</label><input id=”community_city” name=”community[city]” size=”30″ type=”text” value=”<%=@city%>” />

The method or action, in communities_controller.rb is  now set as follows:

def getcity
unless request.xhr?
flash[:error] = ‘Invalid page’
redirect_to “/”
else
location = ZipCode.find(:first,:conditions=>['zip=?',params[:zipcode].to_i]) rescue nil
@city= location.blank? ? ‘no zipcode match’ : location.city
render :partial=>’city_lookup’, :layout => false, :locals => {:city => @city}
end
end

The new view code, notice the ‘id’ of ‘city_lookup’ now on the paragraph holding the text_field we are interested in updating.  Our partial now will replace the contents of this paragraph when a change is made in the zip code field.

<p>
<%= f.label :zipcode, “Zip code” %>: <%= f.text_field :zipcode, :size=>’8′ %>
</p>
<p id=”city_lookup”>
<%= f.label :city, “City (change if zip code lookup is incorrect): ” -%><%= f.text_field :city -%>
</p>
<%= observe_field ‘community_zipcode’,:method => :get,:frequency => 0.25,:update => ‘city_lookup’,:url => {:controller=>’communities’,:action => ‘getcity’},:with => “zipcode” -%>

That’s all folks.  I will update once site is online for working examples.