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I’ve made another gem! It’s called Trendy, and it is a simple wrapper for the Twitter Search API, but the only the part of it that concerns trending topics.

I’ve initially made it pretty simple, so I was able to learn a lot about jeweler and rspec – because I developed this gem using Behaviour/Test Driven Development – that is: I wrote failing tests first, then wrote the code, got it passing, then refactored the code.

Right now, Trendy only works with current topics; in the future, it will support past trending topics.

Visit the GitHub source here (github.com)

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I’ve finally created a gem for Ruby on Rails apps. It’s called YamlSeeder, and its at version 0.0.1, naturally.

YamlSeeder takes foxy-fixture-like YAML files and seeds them into your Rails app, using ActiveRecord.

Why I Made It

Originally, I stored all my seed data in YAML fixture files, and loaded them using Fixtures.create_fixtures.  This had the benefit of being easy to work with, and easy to maintain.  The downside was that it directly inserted the fixtures by SQL into the database’s tables.  But I wanted to use the callbacks and validation methods provided by ActiveRecord when seeding.  (For example, I wanted to generate a permalink field when saving using “before_save”.)

I modeled YamlSeeder after Fixtures.create_fixtures in ActiveRecord.  It supports the belongs_to association, but no other – this will come in a future release.

How Do I Get It?

the easiest way is to type:

gem install yaml_seeder

But for more information, download the gem here.  For the current source code, visit my GitHub here.