Matt Boldt

In my opinion, website nav & toolbars should have somewhat of a native feel to them.

Rails comes equipped with Sass by default. When you build a new app, an application.css stylesheet is created for you. This isn't just a normal stylesheet -- rather, it stands as a master stylesheet in the Rails Asset Pipeline.

I don't usually make new years resolutions like "join a gym" or "go to Iceland and find where Björk lives" but I figured I could set some simple goals and maybe have a list to mark out as the year continues.

Heroku is super powerful and I suggest if you're new to Rails, or any other framework they support (which is a lot), to give them a try. Manual setup for a lot of these languages and frameworks can be really tedious, but Heroku gets it all done for you. This is especially helpful when you first learn [Insert bleeding edge technology here] and it's either not supported by your web host, or a pain in the ass to set up. Of course, down the road, learning how to do it all manually is also helpful.

Rails 4 has done away with using attr_accessible and others like it. The new standard is to use strong parameters, and it definitely seems like a more secure system. But, for legacy apps upgrading to Rails 4, there is a gem called "protected_attributes" that gives you back what Rails 3 and before let you do -- which is the ability to use attr_accessible :attr1, :attr2, etc to mass assign attributes in your model. This, however, does not come without issues.

A cool effect I've been seeing on sites lately involves the use of percentage based heights & absolute positioning. Puzzled by how it worked, I set out to break the code down and do it myself.