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Hey i am having an issue with displaying files with ruby on rails.

I have an upload area where users upload files to a local dir, after that i am trying to display the file names in a list. I need to read the file names from the directory and then display the in a list form....

How would i do this?

The easiest way to make rounded corners on images is obviously by using Photoshop or other graphical software but when dealing with lots of images, this could become extremely tedious. So, what if there was a way of creating rounded corners for all your images using CSS? Well, within this tutorial I’ll show how this can be done.

Adding Rounded Corners to Images Using CSS

When I started web development it was with PHP. However, a little thing called Ruby on Rails came along and has been my focus for the last 3 years.

Well now I've got a few projects that I think Rails would just be overkill for. The projects are fairly simple and do not merit the resources required to run a full Rails app. I have been reading up on PHP again but most of the books I've found have left me still wanting something a little more advanced.

I've been spoiled with MVC and do not want to go back. I know there are MVC frameworks for PHP now, but since I am still going for lightweight, I don't really want to learn another framework. I would much rather begin piecing my own together as I go. There are tons of things in the other frameworks that I will probably never use, so this seems like a waste.

I've picked up nearly every book I've come across lately and haven't been impressed. There doesn't seem to be anything that covers this sort of organization.

I am also looking for some good resources that cover some of the new OOP stuff in PHP, which I figured would go hand in hand with MVC patterns.

Any recommendations on books, online resources, or maybe a good open source project to learn from?

Dale Majors is passionate about cycling. So much so that in 1999, at age 16, he decided to take a chance with selling bicycle gear online. His original goal was simple: He was looking to upgrade his own cycling equipment and needed the money to do so. Like other young aspiring entrepreneurs, he headed to eBay. One thing lead to another, and before long Majors was making roughly $1,000 a month selling cycling parts. Five years later, what had started in his parent’s basement turned into a full-time business — Bikewagon, which quickly became one of the largest cycling stores on eBay. In February 2007, Majors launched a website, Bikewagon.com, and the Salt Lake City-based business shows no sign of slowing of down. High Performer Bikewagon.com Consistent, steady growth pays off for specialty retailer: Scales from classifieds, to eBay to its own site. Size: $1 million approximate 2007 gross revenue. Biggest Obstacle: “Establishing systems and processes that are not...

What is an email blacklist? Email blacklists are compiled by industry watchers who track down the originating servers for emails that have the earmarks of spam. The resulting lists of web hosts, domains or IP addresses are used by anti-spam software companies, Internet service providers and corporate IT departments to determine what emails get through. - Jennifer D. Meacham Bob Frady is making his mark as vice president of direct marketing for LiveNation.com, a concert ticket mega-site based in Beverly Hills, Calif. With 26 million members, LiveNation’s emailed notices and newsletters bring in millions in ticket, CD and T-shirt sales. It’s Frady’s job to ensure those emails get through. “Sometimes I feel like the Internet service providers are playing a game of ‘What am I thinking?’ and responding with ‘You should know,’” Frady said. “Whatever the rules are, we’ll follow them. We just want to know what the rules are.” Frady already follows...

The following is a review from High Rankings Search Marketing Associate Jesse DaCosta regarding the paid-search management certification course he recently finished that was put on by Marketing Experiments. Enjoy! - Jill

Debbie Levitt is the CEO of eBay’s first Certified Service Provider, As Was (Aswas.com), which offers services for online sellers including branding, design, and personalized sales and marketing strategies. Levitt is eBay’s first Certified Consultant and the first Education Specialist trained by eBay. Her recognized expertise as well as her approach to online branding, marketing and strategy are redefining the model of what are “good” eBay listings, eBay Stores, or websites. eBay recently announced some serious changes. What can you tell Practical Ecommerce readers about those changes? We know that with what eBay is planning on changing, sellers need to start reassessing how they do things and finding ways to change as soon as possible. Rather than waiting for eBay Live or an event later this year, we know that sellers need to learn what they can immediately. If Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) give your buyer the chance to rate your communication and how they felt about...

A while back I wrote 25 Ways To Improve Your Site Today. Many people thought it was useful. I’m trying again now with a twist. I’m offering you, dear reader, tips to improve your site in various ways - each one only taking approximately 5 minutes.

This is starting to sound like a one-page spammy advert (did I mention my advice is free free free!) so let’s get stuck in. After all, you only have 5 minutes to read this…

The Tips

Disclaimer: The tips I’ve come up with would take me about 5 minutes to complete on website’s I’ve built. Everyone builds sites differently so times may vary. :-)

Usability/Accessibility

1. Use your logo: Link it to your homepage. Sounds simple enough but it will save time for your users.
2. Make links obvious: It’s a quick job to style them so they contrast against regular body copy.
3. Make text readable: Don’t worry about cramming text so small so it stays ‘above the fold’ - let your text breathe by adding line height and space. And don’t be shy about increasing your font size.
4. Make a useful 404 page: Maybe put a few words to explain what a 404 error is and point people to your site map, homepage or search facility.
5. Offer a way to contact: Sounds simple, but if there is no way to contact you, people may not be able to tell you of issues on the site.

SEO

1. Add title attributes: Add relevant title attributes to your main navigation. It will strengthen on-page SEO with very little effort.
2. Create a Google site map: There are many generators and it only takes minutes. You can increase your website’s saturation almost instantly.
3. Optimise title tags: Check title tags are relevant on your key pages and improve them where necessary.
4. Check headers: Check that pages make use of H1, H2 and H3 tags. Check that these contain your main keywords (and still make perfect sense to the reader. No spammy tactics, else a kitten will tread on broken glass remember.)
5. Link from your copy: Often forgotten about, why not interlink from key pages deeper into the site?

Design/Development

1. Feedback: Get a few people to make one suggestion each about your site. It’s easy to be blind to mistakes on your own website.
2. Browsers: Check your main website’s functionality in (e-commerce/gallery etc) in as many browsers as possible. Note any issues to fix later.
3. Give direction: Your homepage isn’t an ‘about’ page. Give visitors a reason to click around. (Log in / Sign up / Request brochure etc.)
4. Let the user be in control: Avoid popups, resizers and all those nasty things. It’s the users browser, not yours. Most popups can simply be placed on a new page.
5. Animation: I’m not against a bit of useful animation, but don’t let images animate continually whilst the user is trying to read the content or look at a product. It’s like trying to sell a car to someone whilst dancing around distractingly in the background in a giant banana suit. Almost.

Content

1. Rewrite: Read your opening paragraph. If it doesn’t engage you then rewrite it.
2. Simplify: If you use too much jargon, replace as many instances as you can with clear wording. Jargon doesn’t help anyone.
3. RSS: Let your RSS feed be auto-discovered. It’s easier for the user to locate that way.
4. Don’t overdo it: People don’t have all day. Put key information in succinct paragraphs on the page. Waffling (except for around here!) is not for the web.
5. Accessible: Check that you can access all the key pages of your site as a first time user. You may need a volunteer or two to test this theory.

Off Site

1. Visibility: Check that you’re high in Google for your company name. If not, add a few links to your site with the company name in the link.
2. Be nice: Answer a question on a forum about your speciality. You’ll gain a friend and some respect. Authority = traffic.
3. Get involved: If you’re not on (by on I mean even a basic profile/listing) all of the cool places to hang out (Facebook for instance) then sign up. People may be looking for your services via these channels.
4. Read: Read stuff on the internet? But it’s all fake? I kid. Read a news story about your industry - it may come in handy as a reference.
5. Stay Ahead: Similar to the above, except this time keep an eye on new web technology. If you can use a new technology to your advantage and you get in there first then you may have just carved out a niche.

Helped?

I hope that helped out a few of you with little time on your hands. Let me know your quick tips by leaving a comment.

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I've been hired to build a site that I think might be a little but out of my range but I'm willing to try anyway. I usually do HTML using Dreamweaver on sites that are a little more static and don't require much maintenance. However, this client would like a site that can be updated constantly as it's for a car dealership and he'll need to keep a constant inventory of cars to show to customers.

My idea was to go with a Wordpress install and tweak it a bit to fit his needs but I can't find a solid plugin that can keep the inventory that he's looking for. It also needs to be fairly user friendly as neither him or his staff or very good with computers.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I thought I’d play hooky from a meeting and talk about how the newest version of the Toolbar handles 404 pages for users, because I see some people writing about it this morning.

We tried to give a heads-up in a couple places. The Toolbar beta 5 announcement on the Google blog mentioned “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar “Did you mean” with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.” And the John Mueller did an excellent run-down for webmasters when he talked about the Google toolbar beta on Google’s official webmaster blog. Here’s the part of John’s post that probably interests you:

404 errors with default error pages
When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor. If this is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs also listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools account.

If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. The content of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a missing page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the content they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

So if you’re a webmaster and want users to see your custom 404 page, just make your page be more than 512 bytes long. I do think that this feature is really handy for most users. Let me give some screenshots to demonstrate what it looks like.

I installed the Toolbar Beta 5 for Internet Explorer and surfed to a 404 page on mattcutts.com, and I see this:

My 404 page, while not that useful, is more than 512 bytes long, so the toolbar doesn’t change the page.

I had to look around a little bit to find a default 404 page. My former grad school has one, so surfing to a 404 page like http://www.cs.unc.edu/~sadasdf normally looks like this (in Firefox):

With the toolbar installed, I get this page:

There’s a few things I would point out:

- The first several links all provide ways to navigate or search unc.edu. I’m offered the option to go to www.unc.edu, or www.cs.unc.edu, or to search on www.cs.unc.edu for some words.
- Note that the toolbar took my nonsense phrase “sadasdf” and segmented that phrase into a more useful phrase “sad asdf” to search for. For “mattcutts” it suggested “matt cutts” and for “mygoodpage” it suggested “my good page”. That’s really helpful for a non-savvy user because it offers a search which may uncover the information that the user is looking for.
- There is a “Why am I seeing this page?” link.

If you click on the “Why am I seeing this page?” link, you get a page with more info, including how to turn the feature off:

I counted and it was three mouse clicks (click on a picture of a wrench, click to uncheck a box, click to save) to turn off the feature. Try to load a non-existent page, and I’m back to the standard 404 page that IE gives:

So my short summary is:
- If you’re a user and you don’t want help with 404 pages, it’s very easy to turn off just this feature (or don’t install the Google toolbar).
- If you’re a webmaster, customized 404 pages should continue work fine. If you want to be sure that users see your 404 page, make it 512 bytes or longer.

Bonus tip: Most of the people that read my blog use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. If you want some similar functionality on Firefox, I like to use the ErrorZilla extension. It’s a handy little plug-in that gives you error pages like this:

I find the ErrorZilla plug-in really useful, even as a power user.