Redzone News & Forum RSS Feeds

August 13th, 2008

We’ve added RSS feeds for news items as well as each forum that you create for your league. There’s also a feed for all of the forums combined. See your browsers docs and/or use your favourite RSS reader to make use of them.

Enjoy!

file_column image regeneration

August 11th, 2008

If you use file_column for some projects and find that you want to change the thumbnail sizes that you’ve been using for models, then hopefully this little bit of code can help.

Add this as a rake task and run it as filecolumn:regenerate[Model, field] RAILS_ENV=production where Model is the model you want to regenerate images for and field is the filecolumn field on the model. The task uses Rake arguments, so you’ll need Rake 0.8.

namespace :filecolumn do
  desc "Regenerate filecolumn images"
  task :regenerate, :model, :field, :needs => :environment do |task,args|
    if args.any?{|k,v| v.blank?}
      puts "Usage: #{task.name}[Model,field]"
    else
      klass, field = args.model.constantize, args.field

      klass.all.each do |obj|
        puts "Regenerating #{klass} #{obj.id}"
        next if obj.send(field).nil?
        state = obj.send("#{field}_state")
        state.instance_variable_set(:@just_uploaded, true)
        state.transform_with_magick
      end
    end
  end
end
The code essentially boils down to 2 lines…
  • setting @just_uploaded to true on the state object
  • calling the transform_with_magick method on the state object

I thought it was just candy, but it turns out Skittles is also a sport. You can now create Skittles leagues in Redzone, and because Bowling is a decedent of it we added that as well.

Got a sport that you need league software for? Let us know!

Dodgeball added to Redzone

July 23rd, 2008

We’ve added Dodgeball support to Redzone today.

There are tons of variations of Dodgeball, so we tried to keep it simple with the statistics. If you have a variation that you’d like us to support drop us a line and let us know!

Redzone Leagues has recently added kickball as a supported sport. The stats currently configured are basically the same as those used for softball, but if you don't want to use any of them, you can use the "Statistics Management" feature and turn them all off or select just the ones you want to use.

Having a process that automatically monitors your system and restarts applications when things get out of wack is pretty important to have. The 2 popular free options are God and Monit. This article is about not only setting up God to monitor your mongrels, but setting up God only ONCE to do this. If you add another mongrel cluster to your system, all you have to do is restart God.

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Looking for Mephisto 0.8?

March 26th, 2008

I was too, so I popped into the #mephisto channel on freenode and technoweenie set me straight. The subversion trunk in mephisto will be the latest stable release (in this case 0.8) of his github repo.

But for an easy way to just download the 0.8 release, go here and then click on download and you’ll get a nice shiny tarball.

Thanks to the Mepisto team for making a great blogging app!

We've recently added the ability to customize the stats you use in your league.

Not every league tracks the same stats, so instead of cluttering up the interface with stats your league doesn't use, you can now remove them. Or if you would like to add some additional stats to the defaults provided, you can add stats from any of the predefined stats that are available.

To add or remove stats, click on the "Manage Statistics" link from the admin dashboard.

If there are some stats missing that you would like to add to your league, simply contact us via the support link and we'll do our best to add them.

Ultimate (Frisbee) Support

March 24th, 2008

Redzone Leagues has recently added Ultimate as a supported sport. Currently by default, no stats are tracked, but if you have an Ultimate league that does track some stats, let us know and we can add those to the site for you to use.

A few friends have asked about converting their Subversion repositories to use Git, but also have a central repo that they can push/pull with which mimics their Subversion setup. Here’s what I do so that I don’t have to repeat myself :)

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Integrating OmniFocus and Mail.app makes a much better email experience. By using smart folders along with OmniFocus’s “clippings” I can accomplish Inbox Zero most of the time.

I’ve shared my email work flow with a few people already and they also seem to like it, so I decided to make a short screencast demoing what I do. Like I mention in the screencast, most of my workflow is totally ripped off from people like Merlin Mann so check out that site for more email ninja goodness.

DOWNLOAD SCREENCAST (4.8M, 4:16)

Here’s some links related to the screencast: [OmniFocus] [Mail.app] [iGTD] [MailTags]

Reverse DNS and email

February 4th, 2008

I’m not sure how I wrote a blog post about sending email and somehow I left out the part about making sure your mail servers have IP addresses that actually reverse properly.

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Updated for will_paginate 2.3.x

So you’re using the will_paginate plugin and want to use remote AJAX links. You’re not using the will_paginate plugin? Simply install it with…

script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/will_paginate

will_paginate is an alternative to the classic_pagination plugin, which is the pagination plugin that basically took the pre Rails 2.0 pagination implementation and packaged it in plugin form. I won’t discuss the differences between the two plugins here, but there’s a good video explaining the two from Railscasts here.

Out of the box, will_paginate doesn’t allow remote AJAX links for page links, so I’ll show you an easy way to add such functionality…

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Do you use RAILS_ENV in your Rails app to execute different code depending on the environment you’re running?

if RAILS_ENV == 'development'
  log_some_data_or_do_something_different
else
  go_with_the_flow
end

No? Ok, great. Yes? Ok, not so great.

Those from both camps are likely to get something out of this post, so read on.

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I recently upgraded my Macbook Pro to Leopard, and in the process I took down some notes. Since the MBP is my first Mac, this is also the first time that I’ve had to upgrade the OS. I’m aware that there are upgrade and migration tools that make this whole process quicker and easier, but I’ve heard mixed results about them. I also wanted my install to be fresh, since most of the old school Mac guys seem to go this route.

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