Posts from April 2008
Getting Started with phpViddler
Over on the Viddler Lab blog, Colin Devroe and I are putting together a series on how to use phpViddler, the PHP wrapper for Viddler API. Parts one and two are already up, and more are on the way, so definitely check it out if you’re interested in developing a site powered by Viddler.
Old Books, Linderman Library, Lehigh University
I really love the old books at Linderman, I’ll have to go back and take more shots some time.
Cleaning Up User Submitted Data
A little while back, I complained about WordPress’ handling of URLs without “http://”. While it turns out WP actually handles these correctly, it brings up the question on how to handle a user’s inputted data. It’s always important to format or sanitize incoming data, and for items like URLs, which have a well-defined format, it’s really easy to do. Here’s how to do it in Rails.
One of the great things about Ruby is the way it treats just about anything as a method, so if I call link.url = "http://website.com", it’s actually calling the method Link#url= with the parameter of “http://website.com”. So, to intercept incoming data, I just overwrite the default url= method in my Link model:
class Link < ActiveRecord
def url=(new_url)
if new_url[0..6] != 'http://'
new_url = 'http://' + new_url
end
super(new_url)
end
end
So, now, when I set the url, it’s automatically formatted correctly. Some may advocate putting something like this in a before_save callback, but personally, I like to make sure the data is always correct, even when it hasn’t yet been saved.
