Matthew's recap of RubyConf 2012 in Denver has been posted on his blog. He also attended Indieconf 2012 in Raleigh on November 17th and has posted recaps of that as well. Enjoy!

Matthew is attending RubyConf in Denver and will be posting a recap of the experience shortly.

Matthew attended the Ruby Hoedown in Nashville this year. He has posted a recap of the experience over on his personal blog.

We built the original Spreedly extension for Radiant a couple of years ago. It's a nice little package that makes it really easy to integrate Spreedly's subscription payment system with your Radiant site. You can choose which pages to require a subscription to view, manage subscribers from the admin backend, and so on. It's long overdue, but we finally got around to upgrading the extension to work flawlessly with Radiant 0.9.1. Check it out and have fun.

Matthew will be speaking at RubyRX 2009, to be held in Reston, Virginia on September 10th and 11th. As part of the run-up to the conference, Jared Richardson has posted a series of interviews with some of the speakers. In Matthew's interview he discusses iPhone development, MacRuby, Git, and testing frameworks, among other things.

We're really looking forward to presenting again at RubyRX. Matthew will be giving two talks this year. Git with Ruby will explore the Git source control system and how Ruby can take advantage of it. In Which Ruby Testing Framework Should I Use? we’ll briefly examine several leading testing frameworks and study the pros and cons of each. You’ll leave fully prepared to pick the best framework for your next project.

Lindo is a new Ruby gem we've released that makes Rails testing easier. If you're a regular user of assert_select (or rspec's have_tagequivalent) you probably find yourself frequently doing something like this when the assertion is failing and you can't figure out why:

def test_something
  post :something
  raise @response.body.inspect
  assert_select "div[id=header]"
end

Inspecting the response body usually leads to a solution, but it can be tedious parsing through the huge amount of HTML that gets returned, often in a semi-unreadable format. Enter Lindo:

gem install lindo

Lindo adds a vr method to your functional and integration tests. When this method is called, the response body is automatically opened in the default browser allowing for easy visual inspection of the page’s content:

post :new
vr

If you’d prefer to jump straight to the source code, passing the :html symbol will open the formatted HTML in the default text editor:

post :new
vr :html

This has saved us a lot of time figuring out why a specific assertion is failing. Instead of parsing through the HTML, we can view the entire page and immediately tell if something is missing or out of place. We often call vr even before writing assertions.

After installing, check out the README file for additional documentation. There is also a GitHub project if you’d like to contribute a patch or fork the code.

After a long hiatus, we've finally been able to relaunch the Adeptware site, complete with a new look and feel. Why the delay? Well, we've been very busy with customer work. This is definitely a good thing!

Something I've struggled with lately is the whole branding issue. Is "Matthew Bass" our brand or is Adeptware our brand? Most of my blogging lately has been personal. Most people who have heard me speak at a conference know me by my name, not my company. We're trying to change that.

With the decision made to focus on Adeptware again, I plan on making regular posts here. I'll still post on my personal blog, but the posts relating to the products we're building or the discoveries we're making while doing client work will be made here. Thanks for joining us!