Update: I was unable to find the real cause of this problem. I worked around it by checking for a text match only on blur (when the text input loses focus, i.e., you click or tab away from the input field). This solved the problem, and had the side benefit of reducing the calls to the server, particularly because using JavaScript’s setInterval meant the function kept being called, even after the modal dialog had closed!

Oops! I was in such a hurry to post the video yesterday that I didn’t realize it was only the first half of the talk! Here’s part two.

Here’s the video for the Berlin Geekettes panel I spoke on last Thursday at Campus Party. I hope the sound is ok; the acoustics of the space left something to be desired.

Topics of discussion include stereotype threat, “having it all” and what success means, and how to get more women involved in tech.

EDIT: There’s a second part to this video, which can be seen in my next post.

I don’t know if the video from Campus Party Europe is up yet, but this from when I gave the same talk at RuLu in June.

Rather than chaining together the way something like .title.example (which would select element with both classes “title” and “example”, regardless of order), the pseudo-element order matters. So li:before:first-child is styling the first child of the li:before element, while li:first-child:before is styling the :before pseudo-element on the first li.

In fact, in looking up the documentation to link below, I realized that :first-child is actually a pseudo-class, rather than a pseudo-element. The docs below don’t state it, but it’s possible that in order to get correct behavior, the pseudo-class should always come before the pseudo-element.

References:
pseudo-class
pseudo-element
:before
:first-child

[update (5 May 2013)] I gave a slightly revised version of the talk at the Rails Girls Berlin 1st Anniversary workshop. The revised slide deck can be found here. [end update]

My projects

• Yo Dawg
• JK Swimwear
• Cobot App Directory

Rails, Git, Heroku, and Stack Overflow

• Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl (book)
• GitHub
• git-scm.com
• Pro Git
• Stack Overflow
• Search Stack Overflow with Google
• Heroku
• Heroku Dev Center
• Search Heroku Dev Center with Google
• Rails Guides
• Rails API
• api.rubyonrails.org
• apidock.com/rails
• railsapi.com

Development Tools

• Rubular (experiment with regular expressions, a.k.a. ‘regexes’)
• Markdown (simple formatting used by Github and Stack Overflow for user comments; can also be used for user input from your projects!)
• Pow (Mac-only local server tool; you can use this instead of firing up rails s)

Design Tools

• Twitter Bootstrap
• HSL Picker (play with colors and get 3 different ways of writing each color)
• Visual Mess (guide to design basics)

The relevant bits of the final code, with comments, can be viewed in this gist.

I first had to figure out why I was getting a nil.update_attributes error. I ruled out the absence of my record, then lost time thinking that the test was somehow losing the hash of values I wanted to update to, before realizing that the big difference between my test and my actual code (which was already working fine) was the absence of the cookie used by the update function to find the correct record.

The next big hurdle was finding out why cookies[:subdomain_name] = "my_subdomain" didn’t actually set anything, or at least anything I could retrieve. This thread from ruby-forum.com was crucial in helping me understand what was happening, and two threads on StackOverflow helped me figure out the syntax I needed.

I managed to make a merge back in, but I had to use GitX (a GUI for git) to do it. I have no idea what the syntax is for telling git to merge from (no branch). I tried it just like that, but got an error for having parentheses unexpectedly. I opened GitX to take a look around, and the first thing I selected in the tree history (sorry, can’t recall what it was) threw an error and took me to the commit window to resolve my conflicts for the merge. Of course, I had to do the actual edits for the conflicts in my usual editor (MacVim), and then GitX forced me to run the commit from the command line, but at least it got me started and off of my no-branch purgatory!