Recipe: Accessing Your Subversion Revision in Rails
Have you ever looked at a Rails web site and wanted to know precisely which code revisions were deployed? If you know that a certain fix was implemented in Revision 436, how can you verify whether that fix has been deployed to production? This recipe shows how to quickly and easily solve this problem.

Our First RubyNation Video is Live
Our first RubyNation video is now live. It features Jim Wierich and his well received "SOLID Ruby" talk. It's been a lot of work getting the RubyNation video production effort off the ground, so it's nice to finally see our first polished video (only 28 more conference sessions to go).

Quick Start: ActiveScaffold
ActiveScaffold is more than just a replacement for the default scaffold functionality built into the Rails framework. The ActiveScaffold plugin provides a simple way for developers to quickly and easily add sophisticated data maintenance and data display features to web sites. Find out more about ActiveScaffold from my ActiveScaffold presentation, which is finally available online in PDF form.

MetroStar Systems Sponsors RubyNation

MetroStar Systems, a 10-year-old Information Technology Provider and one of Inc's "America's Fastest Growing Companies," has agreed to be a Diamond sponsor for RubyNation 2010, which will be held April 9 - 10. MetroStar is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, and specializes in systems and software integration for government clients. It provides clients with agile, collaborative solutions designed to integrate people, processes, technology and learning across an organization.

Creating a Breadcrumb Trail in Rails, Part 2
In Part 1, we built the basic functionality for generating a breadcrumb trail for a Rails application, but we didn't worry about packaging the code for maximum reusability. Well, "cut-and-paste" is not a sustainable reusability paradigm. In this article, we'll further streamline the breadcrumbs code and also show how to package it up to enhance reusability.

ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest Site
The ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest site was launched on November 17, 2009. Here's a sceenshot of the web site, which looks pretty cool now that the community has uploaded a bunch of videos.

The purpose of the contest is to help drive up the membership for the Department of State's ExchangesConnect social network, which is focused on promoting cross-cultural understanding around the world. The social network and the contest have been done for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Check out the contest now! There's plenty of room for more participants.

Secretary Hillary Clinton on My Online Video Contest
Secretary Hillary Clinton speaks about the impending launch of my new web project, the ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest:

The ExchangesConnect Video Contest launches on November 17, 2009. This is a project I've worked on with fellow Rubyists David McVicar and Kelly Gifford, so we're all pretty pleased.

Videotaping RubyNation 2010
I'm one of the founders of the annual RubyNation technical conference, which will be held for the third time on April 8 - 10, 2010. Each year that we've held the conference, we've tried to up the ante in producing a bigger, better conference.

One of the exciting developments for RubyNation 2010 is that we're planning to videotape the conference sessions this year. More than that, we're going to produce a documentary about what it takes to organize and run a conference. I will be functioning as the producer for this documentary, which currently has a working title of "The Road to RubyNation: The Making of a Conference". When completed, this documentary will be shown on public television and will be streamed online.

Pre-Launch Animated Montage
Johnny Nguyen put together another animated photo montage (with the help of Animoto.com) to illustrate my development team's run-up to the launch of our new contest site for the Department of State.

Online Video Contest Launches in Two Weeks
Since mid-August, I've been working as part of a team to create an online video contest for the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. They operate an online social network called ExchangesConnect that promotes cross-cultural understanding across the world. This is the second year that my company, MetroStar Systems, has implemented and managed an online contest for this client.

How To Create an Atom Feed in Rails
You've got a great web site with great content. Now you'd like to make it easy for people to discover your content. You also need help generating traffic for your site. One of the best ways to do publicize your web site is to add a feed to your site. This article illustrates how to add an Atom feed to a web site using Ruby on Rails.

David Keener at RubyNation 2009
Many thanks to Dave Bock and Don Anderson, who snapped some excellent photos of me speaking at the RubyNation 2009 Conference on June 12th. Click here to see the full set of photos from my talk.

Creating a RESTful Web Services API
I just gave a presentation, Creating a World-Class RESTful Web Services API, at RubyNation 2009. The presentation is now available online in PDF form. It's about my practical experiences creating a RESTful API for Grab Networks, a major supplier of news videos to the online world. It covers what I think is a pretty interesting architecture, almost a mini-framework, for creating web services in Rails.

David Keener at RubyNation 2008
Many thanks to Gray Herter, who snapped some nice photos of me speaking at the RubyNation 2008 Conference in August. Click here to see the full set of photos from my talk.

Practical Tips for Rails Migrations
Migrations are one of the neatest features provided by the Rails framework. The thing to remember, though, is that migrations are still code. Even migrations can get out-of-control after a while, unless you follow some practical tips for keeping them useful and relevant.

Creating a Breadcrumb Trail in Rails, Part 1
Lots of web sites have breadcrumb trails to show users the hierarchy of pages through which a user has navigated to reach their current page. In this article, I provide a simple set of generic methods that can be used to easily add a breadcrumb trail to a Rails web site.

NovaRUG: Implementing OpenID for Your Social Networking Site
On March 19, 2008, I presented on OpenID and Rails to the NovaRUG. There are thousands of social networking sites, each with their own unique sign-on systems. How many user names and passwords do you really want to remember? Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a single sign-on that you could use on all of the sites that you frequent? OpenID is an open-source, decentralized sign-on technology that promises this and more. My PDF presentation on OpenID is available online.

Implementing OpenID for Your Social Networking Site
There are thousands of social networking sites, each with their own unique sign-on systems. How many user names and passwords do you really want to remember? Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a single sign-on that you could use on all of the sites that you frequent? OpenID is an open-source, decentralized sign-on technology that promises this and more. My PDF presentation on OpenID is now available online.

Java Developers Notice Rails
The latest issue of the Java Developers Journal features an in-depth primer on Ruby on Rails. It's a nice article by Ryan Garver, and a solid introduction to Rails. I think the Java community is beginning to notice this new, upstart technology.

JRuby Speed Test
JRuby is an implementation of Ruby in Java. It's come a long way in the last two years, going from pipe dream to viable platform. In the latest speed tests, JRuby has proven to be even faster than the C-based Ruby implementation.

Quick Start: What Is Rails?
Here's a brief but useful presentation that I've successfully used to introduce the Ruby on Rails technology to folks with absolutely no knowledge of it. Suitable for non-technical manager types, as well.

Speaking On: Implementing OpenID for Your Social Networking Web Site
I will be presenting at the Washington DC Ruby on Rails User Group on December 13th, from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM. The meeting will be held at George Washington University.

October 2007 Presentation
David Keener will be presenting for the Washington DC Ruby on Rails User Group. The topic will be: "Using Rails to Create an Enterprise App: A Real-Life Case Study." Find out more about this upcoming presentation, which will be given on Thursday, October 18th, at George Washington University.

Debugging Cross-Database Issues in Rails Migrations
It's pretty common in the Rails community to use migrations with multiple types of databases, e.g. - developers might use MySQL in their development environments while creating code targeted to run in production against an Oracle database. Learn about some of the pitfalls, and solutions, associated with using migrations in a cross-database manner.

Conditional Logic in Rails Migrations
Migrations are an awesome feature of Rails. Since they're implemented in Ruby, you can add conditional logic to perform database actions only if needed. Find out how!

Rails Date Manipulation
Date manipulation is the bane of existence for enterprise developers. It seems like manipulating dates should be so easy, but yet it's generally tedious, painful and basically not fun. However, in Rails, it's not so bad. Find out why.

DOM Popup Kit
The DOM Popup Kit is a nice JavaScript utility for adding in-page popup elements to your web pages. Find out more about this simple, but useful, JavaScript utility, including how to use it in a Ruby on Rails application.

Quick Start: Rails LiveTree
This short presentation from my brother, Steve Keener, provides a step-by-step roadmap for creating a dynamic tree feature for a web site using the LiveTree JavaScript code and the Rails "acts_as_tree" mechanism.

My Presentation for the DC Ruby on Rails Users Group
I gave a presentation on Ruby Vector Graphics (RVG) at the Washington DC Ruby on Rails Users Group on May 3rd. Find out how it went.

Multiple Form Buttons in Rails
Simple forms may be sufficient for most web solutions, but not all of them. Find out how to create forms in Ruby on Rails that contain multiple buttons.

Speaking at DC Ruby Users Group in May
I was asked by Dave Naffis, one of the founders of the Washington DC Ruby User Group, to give a talk at one of the upcoming meetings (the May 3rd meeting, as it turns out). Find out more about my upcoming talk.

On Being a Rails Expert
There's been a lot of hype lately about a new technology called Ruby on Rails. What does it really take to be a Rails expert?

Getting Started With Ruby on Rails
This article describes a few tools, such as InstantRails and RadRails, that will help new developers get started with Ruby on Rails.