Ruby on Rails Planet

Slides from my Rails Underground 2009 talk »

Created at: 24.07.2009 18:37, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails PLANET ARGON hosting rubyonrails agile conference deployment london talk feedback seo railsunder presentation analytics sem

Hello from London!

Am currently enjoying the talks at Rails Underground 2009 in London and had the pleasure to be one of the first speakers at the conference. My talk covered a collection of what our team considers best practices. Best practices that aid in the successful launch of a web application and covered a few Rails-specific topics as well.

I’ll be sharing some posts in the coming week(s) that’ll expand on some of these topics as promised to the audience.

Launching Ruby on Rails projects: A checklist

View more documents from Robby Russell.

Since I covered a wide range of topics, I decided to share my slides online. They won’t provide as much context (as I’m not speaking as you’ll look at them), but they might hint at some of the topics that I covered. There was a guy video taping the talks… so I assume that a video of my talk will be posted online in the near future.

Until then… here are the slides

Aliasing resources in Ruby on Rails »

Created at: 23.06.2009 09:00, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails programming PLANET ARGON rubyonrails rails routes seo development

Earlier today, a friend working on a project asked me how we approached routes on our website. If you take a quick peak at our website, you’ll see that we have URLs like so:

http://planetargon.com/
http://planetargon.com/who-we-are
http://planetargon.com/who-we-are/robby-russell
I couldn’t remember where I came across this before and wasn’t quickly finding it in the Ruby on Rails API, so decided that I’d do a quick write up on it.

When we launched our new site a few months ago, we were working off an existing code base. We have a model named, TeamMember and a corresponding controller. When we decided to come up with new conventions for our URL structure, we opted to ditch the normal Rails conventions and go our own route. What we weren’t sure about was how to alias resources in our routes nicely. After some digging around, we came across the :as option.

So, our route was:

  map.resources :team_members

Which provided us with:

/team_members
/team_members/robby-russell

We simply added :as => 'who-we-are' to our route:

  map.resources :team_members, :as => 'who-we-are'

...and we got exactly what we were looking for in our URLs.


* /who-we-are
* /who-we-are/gary-blessington

If you look at our site, you’ll notice that we did this in a few areas of our application so that we could define our own URL structure that was more friendly for visitors and search engines.

Anyhow, just a quick tip for those who want to change up their URLs with Ruby on Rails.

p.s., if you know where I can find this documented, let me know so that I can provide a URL in this post for others. :-)