Archive for December 2011

New look for Rambling Labs!

December 30, 2011

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 30, 2011.

As you may have noticed, our logo, our favicon, and our site and blog have a new look. We have added a pretty Home page, a cool Contact page and an informative About us page. Also, the blog has moved from it’s original location at the root of the ramblinglabs.com domain to ramblinglabs.com/blog. Every old blog post link and blog tag link has been taken care of and redirects to the new location.

The site is gonna be used as our portfolio site, and will be our first thing to show to our customers. We plan to use it as the center of our developed products and projects. But, hey, don’t worry, we won’t stop blogging!

How the site came to be for the first time…
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jQuery Rambling Slider v0.3.0 released!

December 28, 2011

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 28, 2011.

Version 0.3.0 of the jQuery Rambling Slider is out! Well… it’s been out for a while now (a couple of weeks), but I haven’t had the time to write the post for it :/. You can download it from GitHub.

Basically added a lot of tests and some transitions. I also removed and/or changed some of the transitions, so I will be updating the documentation soon (wiki). This release includes these features and fixes:
- Changed file combining order logic.
- Migrated the styles to Sassy stylesheets.
- Tweaked theme method to change it for all containers as well.
- Fixed glitch on image to flash transitions.
- Fixed 'this' is not a function issue for flash transitions.
- Fixed slider…
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Using RVM within a cron job

December 16, 2011

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 16, 2011.

Long time no post! I’ve been really busy these days with some projects. Yet, here I am again, so here it goes.

A couple of days ago, I started working on a big story in one of those projects I’m currently working on. It’s one of those things that needs to be run a couple of times a day… yeah, a scheduled background job.

Basically, what it need to do is check some database records, check their expiration date against the current date, and take some actions for each one of the expired ones. Simple enough, right?

I went ahead and wrote a rake task that would do the heavy work. Something like this:
```
task :check_expired_records do
  Record.where('expired =…
```
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CoffeeScript: The '=>' operator

December 16, 2011

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on December 16, 2011.

As you may know, I’ve been playing around with CoffeeScript for a couple of months now.

One of CoffeeScript’s jewels that I haven’t talked about yet and that I’ve been using lately on the jQuery Rambling Slider codebase, is the => operator. It is basically a custom function definition, which binds that function to the current context. That is, it ties the this value of the outer scope to the this value of the function being defined.

How many times, writing JavaScript, have you done something like this:
```
var outerFunctionWithCallback = function(options, callback) {
  /* Do something with options */
  callback();
};

var theFunction = function(){
  var self
```
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