Ruby breakfast » RubyOnRails

Tiny trick : lazy i18n-aware title helper

Emilien Taque — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:55:30 +0000

You’re probably already using a title helper, storing your page title into an instance variable in order to output it in the layout.

I’m using the following trick to use by default the “.title” i18n key of the current page, that’s useful only for static-title pages.

No more <% title(“.title”) %>, let’s simply <% title %> it !

Dealing with permalinks in Rails

Emilien Taque — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:29:25 +0000

When you want to improve your SEO karma, you have to play with your urls. You can use norman/friendly_id, but you can also do it yourself, it’s quite simple: just rewrite to_param method.

We can go further by creating a column for the permalink and using a hook to fill it:

On the controller side, it remains the same thanks to this Ruby behaviour:

More interesting, we can avoid duplicate content by redirecting urls with a bad permalink:

Update

Thanks to Henryk Nye, I’ve improved my :redirect_if_moved method (maybe should I rename it :redirect_if_better).

Direct quote:

Using :overwrite_params will ensure any additional parameters are unchanged.

Have SEO fun!

404 to the rescue

Emilien Taque — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 13:19:58 +0000

There are the “not found” related exceptions rescued by 404 in my rails apps:



rescue_from ActionController::RoutingError,

ActionController::UnknownAction,

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound,

ActionView::MissingTemplate,

ActionController::MethodNotAllowed,

WillPaginate::InvalidPage, :with => :route_not_found
protected
# 404

def route_not_found

render :template => ‘welcome/404′, :status => :not_found

end

(The Peugeot 404 by Pleuntje)