Biodegradable Geek

Scraping Google Trends with Mechanize and Hpricot

This is a small Ruby script that fetches the 100 trends of the day for a specific date. If multiple dates are searched, one can find out how many times a keyword occurred between two dates, or just find out what keywords are constantly appearing on the top 100 list. The script is incomplete and [...]

AnimeCrazy Scraper Example Using Hpricot & Mechanize

This is a little (as of now incomplete) scraper I wrote to grab all the anime video code off of AnimeCrazy (dot) net. This site doesn’t host any videos on its own server, but just embeds ones that have been uploaded to other sites (Megavideo, YouTube, Vimeo, etc). I don’t know who the original uploaders [...]

Mephisto for the Masses – Installation HOWTO

I’ve recently taken a fancy to Mephisto, a blogging-platform written in Rails. I have nothing against WordPress, but being in Ruby and using Liquid for themes, Mephisto is far easier (and more fun) to tweak and configure, especially when I want to migrate my sites away from the “blog look” and make them more dynamic. [...]

Script to Quickly Setup WebApp Environment and Domain

Just sharing a script I wrote to quickly deploy WordPress (and eventually a few other webapps) sites, which somebody might find useful. This uses Linode‘s API* to add the domain name to the DNS server along with some subdomains. If you’re using another server, (Slicehost, your own, etc), you can alter the dns class to [...]

How to POST Form Data Using Ruby

POSTing data on web forms is essential for writing tools and services that interact with resources already available on the web. You can grab information from your Gmail account, add a new thread to a forum from your own app, etc. The following is a brief example on how this can be done in Ruby [...]

Introduction to Validations & Validation Error Handling in Rails

Validations in Ruby on Rails are essentially nothing more than methods that ensure that the data in a model is valid before saving it to the database. Traditionally, we validate data coming in using conditional expressions (for example, if email != NULL or if passwd==passwd_confirmation). This task is essential, but boring and tedious, but Rails’ [...]