Here’s a quick tip to exert greater control over which parts of your site a search engine should crawl: modify your link_to helper to make links rel="nofollow" by default. It’s easy:
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No, I don't work in NYC, DC, or the valley, and I'm cool with that.
Archives for Blog
Prevent GoogleBot Overload with Default Nofollow
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Sep 26, 2011
Valium 0.4.0 released, now with 100% more English
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Just a quick update about Valium 0.4.0. In 0.3.0, I enabled support for extracting attribute values from associations (a la User.posts[:id]). That was awesome, but as it turns out, not too compatible with 3.0.x associations.
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Sep 9, 2011
Slow MySQL query? I’ll give you a hint.
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I have a confession to make: I’ve placed too much trust in MySQL’s query planner. By the phrase, “too much trust,” I mean to say, “any trust, at all, ever.”
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Aug 30, 2011
The Cure for ActiveRecord Instantiation Anxiety: Valium
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No, not the drug — the Ruby gem! Have you ever written code like this?
Model.where(:attribute => 'value').map(&:id).each do |model_id| # ... end
I’m guessing you have, even if only as you were just getting started learning Rails/Ruby. It’s a bad idea.
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Aug 24, 2011
Benchmarking Ruby’s Enumerable
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Lately, I’ve been spending some time filtering data sets in Ruby. A common pattern when filtering data on multiple criteria involves short-circuiting processing at the first match or non-match, depending on whether conditions are being evaluated in an any/or or all/and context, respectively. As a result, I thought I’d run a few quick benchmarks on several implementations of this pattern. The results surprised me, so I thought I would share them here. Read the rest of this post
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Jul 16, 2011
Thoughts on the Facebook “Event”
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By my use of sarcastic quotes in the title, I suppose you can surmise that my general opinion is that the Facebook “Something Awesome” event, wasn’t. Group text chat, a new design, and Skype integration? Seriously?
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Jul 6, 2011
What’s new with Squeel?
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Why, I’m glad you asked! It’s been a while since I’ve made any updates about Squeel — since before RailsConf, actually! A lot’s been added since then.
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Jul 3, 2011
“WTH is happening to Rails?” I’ll tell you.
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I just read the blog post that got some traction on HN last night, entitled “What the hell is happening to rails?” It goes on to list a litany of complaints against changes in Rails 3.x, ranging from the default commenting of the catch-all route to, yes, of course, CoffeeScript. They all end up sounding a lot like “I don’t like change,” an argument we’ve all heard before. The difference is that Steve Coast, the post’s author, casts himself in the role of a crusader for the newbies. He says that he, personally, “gets” why these changes were made, but that the most recent versions of Rails are actually harder to learn than the older ones were. The post highlighted two things, to me:
- Some people still miss the point of Ruby on Rails, even after all these years.
- There’s a difference between “easy to learn” and “easy to use,” and when these competing goals butt heads, the latter should always win out.
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Jun 14, 2011
Scaling Web Applications: My “3 Questions” Philosophy
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As I see it, any reasonable plan for scaling web applications is going to address 3 questions:
- How can we accomplish more work?
- How can we give the appearance of accomplishing more work?
- How can we avoid doing work that doesn’t matter?
So, how do we address these questions? Well, first, we remember that to the end user, the perception that the application is functioning correctly and with reasonable speed is of topmost importance. Everything else lines up behind these two considerations. Since perception is reality, we quickly discover that we can cheat, and the challenge comes in determining where, when, and how to do so.
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Jun 2, 2011
About
I'm Ernie Miller. But then, you probably knew that by looking at the page title, or the URL. I'm a Ruby programmer in Louisville, Kentucky. This blog used to be called "metautonomo.us", which I thought was kind of clever, but nobody, including me, could type it. Lesson learned.