I'm hoping to avoid building this if it already exists. Does anyone know of a plugin for Ruby on Rails that will generate a screenshot of a web site? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me find one.
As far as I am aware you need a server with a desktop (eg. Gnome, X11, KDE) and a web browser with thumbnail capabilities installed (eg. webkit and CutyCapt). Of course this is not usual for a Linux server.
I have used the service suggested by Soufiane using code based on Peter Coopers snippet and it works very well.
Generating website thumbnails would require significant server resources and some sort of background process and job queue so using a web thumbnail generation service might be a better alternative to generating your own.
Yes there is a wonderful solution:
http://webthumb.bluga.net/
It has an great API and there are some Ruby Wrappers (i.e. http://github.com/simplificator/rwebthumb)
It allows you to process 100 thumbnails a month, if you need more the price for credits is very generous if you ask me.
This is not a plugin, but I found this snippet which is using an external site to do what you want (I think.). I didn't test it though.
This is getting a little dated now, but just for posterity's sake there is an answer over here
Related
I;m a developer looking to make an app similar to chat roulette. I'm pretty comfortable with Ruby on Rails as my platform and would like to program it in that.
The downside is I have no idea about how to do anything using webcams.
Is there a plugin or gem for rails that integrates webcams easily?
Some quick browsing brought me to abobes site...but I haven't used it before, and though I dont mind learning new things, I'd like to get this out quickly so I'd rather stick to what I know.
What you do you use for webcams?
You would have to use a third-party plug-in to interface the webcam with the site. Rails takes care of things on the back-end (finding and connecting users) but you would need to use Flash or something similar to connect the web page with the camera.
This question is pretty old, but we've been able to use headshot gem in one of our apps.
https://github.com/diwadm/headshot
Given a Rails application on the server, what is the best charting/graphing solution for displaying dynamic, database driven charts/graph on a web page such as those available in Google Analytics.
An optimal solution would include components that can speak JSON back-and-forth with the Rails application via AJAX.
Thanks!
Check Google Visualization API
how about open flash plugin ;
i have created some nice graphs with this
http://pullmonkey.com/projects/open_flash_chart
Take a look at amCharts.
While many good solutions presented above, the best imho is FusionCharts
Including those suggested here, I rank the solution as follows:
FusionCharts
Open Flash Charts (plugin: http://pullmonkey.com/projects/open_flash_chart)
Ziya LiquidRails (which runs on top of XML/SWF Charts)
The Google Visualization API is nice as well but not unless you're comfortable with everything running through their servers (which I doubt most are). Insofar as my #1 option goes above, the only downside is cost (though there is a free lite version as well).
Thanks again for all the suggestions made above.
Morris.js is definitely worth a look.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/223-charts-graphs-revised?view=asciicast
http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/
I am working with a client to migrate a web site from the existing production hardware into a new hardware environment. Now seems like an excellent time to perform an audit and remove any old or obsolete content rather than just blindly copy it again.
Are there any good free tools or scripts I can use to compare the web accessible content on a server to the actual files on a server to see what content is actually being linked to and used?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Well, for starters you can use a tool like Xenu's Link Sleuth to spider all of your pages to find broken links and the like. We used this tool on our intranet to find and fix our broken links. It's free and gets the job done.
Another tool that we have used for migrations between systems is a search engine. A good search engine will spider all of your pages and show the two-way relationship between links. This can help you find what content is being linked to the most and what is possibly orphaned. Unfortunately, these kinds of tools are not free.
I'm sure there is but I'm sure there isn't one that could do a better job than you could yourself, ya know? How big is this site and did you code it yourself?
Is there a defacto way of doing an Ajaxy file upload in Rails? (I say "Ajaxy" because it can't really use XHR).
I've read about various approaches and plugins. Wondering what's the cleanest/most approved of by the community.
Thanks!
SWFUpload is a common tool for Ajaxy uploads.
Here are a couple links that should integration with Rails.
http://blog.airbladesoftware.com/2007/8/8/uploading-files-with-swfupload
http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2008/12/22/flash-uploaders-rails-cookie-based-sessions-and-csrf-rack-middleware-to-the-rescue
If you dont want the uploader bases on flash, you can check http://blueimp.github.com/jQuery-File-Upload/ its pretty cool.
I've used responds_to_parent with success on several projects.
The idea is that you're doing a full POST to an iframe embedded on the page. The responds_to_parent plugin adds some helpful functionality to then execute success or failure javascript in the context of the main page.
I've had a good time with Plupload. There is a plupload-rails gem (I don't trust the plupload-rails3, it's too automated, but might be fine). It offers several runtimes (html5,html4,flash,silverlight,gears,...) and they can be setup as fallbacks for each other, so you can support all clients no matter if they have silverlight or flash or even if they use internet explorer.
jQuery-File-Upload looked nice, and I almost used it in mu last project, but I had a very hard time getting it to play nicely with Internet Explorer. (I was also using Amazon S3, which complicated things)
I just saw the date, I hope new comers find this useful.
I'm looking for a Rails plugin that eases the development of a "friends" system or social networking system for the latest versions of Ruby on Rails.
Before anyone says it...I know, I should probably create it myself, from scratch. And I am fully capable of this (I think). I'm just looking for a good plugin that can a.) make life a bit easier for me and b.) give me some ideas for reference.
I tried to make my own authentication system, and did what I thought was okay, but then I switched to restful_authentication and realized how poor my system was in comparison.
Thanks in advance...
U might wanna try Community Engine
from the website
CommunityEngine is a free, open-source
social network plugin for Ruby on
Rails applications. Drop it into your
new or existing application, and
you’ll instantly have all the features
of a basic community site.
it uses engines, easy to change layouts or do modifications
real world example - http://www.weebabystuff.com/
another option I know is Insoshi as Chuck posted
updated : look at this blogpost http://jimneath.org/2008/04/25/building-a-social-network-site-in-rails/
-- Ed :) --
You could look into http://lovdbyless.com/
This is a free open-source Rails social networking app which should give you plenty of ideas and pointers.
Ronald
You HAVE to see this railscasts video.
try acts_as_network plugin
The only one I know of is Insoshi. I haven't used it myself, but it sounds like that's what you're looking for.
I would recommend using OpenID library for rails to handle authentication.
On top of what others have said, there's also acts_as_network. The bonus of this one is that it's a pure plugin (doesn't require engines). Not having to worry about engines is a huge plus. The downside, of course, is that it's not a full fledged social network. It's just a friending plugin for models.
You might want to checkout the Amistad gem. It looks pretty simple and it supports both Mongoid and Active Record.
For avatars i would use avatar and try will-paginate for pagination. other then that i love can_serach to make it alot easier to search in the database.
You should also look at the other gems by technoweenie. There is alot of great stuff there that can help you
I've just been researching this myself and chosen to go with Bort & CommunityEngine
Bort because I am familiar with it already and it provides all you need in user authentication and basic application functionality. Community Engine because it is an Engines based plugin and some aspects of Engines are being merged into Rails 2.3 so I know what I learn will continue to be useful and because CommunityEngine seems more modular while lovedbyess and Insoshi seem more like complete applications and I suspect it would likely be more work to disentangle the features I want from the ones I don't. However, take that with a huge grain of salt since it is just based on high-level quick browse initial impressions.
If you just want an activity feed then there is the activity streams plugin