Learnings for Week 30 2010

Well, I’ve been slacking again, here’s the learnings from a couple weeks ago.

• IE must “haveLayout for opacity”:http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2006/08/16/css-opacity-in-internet-explorer-ie/ (alpha filter) to work. You can use the IE zoom rule to give an element layout if needed:

zoom: 1;

• To add custom Date/Time formats in Rails:

Time::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(:article => "%A, %B %d, %Y")
Date::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(:article => "%A, %B %d, %Y")

Don’t forget to add your custom formats to Date as well, they use a different hash. This can then be used like so:

Date.today.to_s(:article)

• When using Paypal buttons you can change the Currency that is used by “adding a hidden field”:https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/sell/mc/mc_wa-outside:

<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="CAD">

• The Rails Request object has a number of useful methods for “finding the url that was used for the request”:http://programming-tut.blogspot.com/2010/06/ruby-on-rails-request-url.html:

request.host_with_port => example.com:3000
request.path           => /controller/action
request.url            => http://example.com:3000/controller/action