Removing an Item With the Jquery-CSS-Ajax Trifecta

Recently I’ve been working on a basic dive logging application with my buddy Chris from caguthrie.com. The idea is to take the very manual booklet that divers have to fill out after a dive and bring it online. Similar products like this exist, but we wanted to make our own.

I’m using this project to beef up my javascript/ajax skills and as such, will be writing today about removing items from a page using javascript, and then removing those items from your database by making an ajax request to your server.

We built a section in the log where you can add fish that you’ve seen on your dive. It’s based on a scrape of common fish from wikipedia. Here’s an example:

Launching a Sinatra-based Heroku App With Postgres

Friday was equally one of the most frustrating and satisfying days I’ve had since I’ve started at the Flatrion School. We spent the day working on our pending labs/personal projects and I picked up where I’d left off on my venture to scrape yelp and display museum opening and closing hours dynamically. Once I had my css where I felt like it was somewhat presentable, I decided to set up my application on Heroku, something I imagined would be a simple and painless process. Was I wrong. What followed was five hours of dealing with obstacle after obstacle to get my app launched – so much so that at one point I had four TAs gathered around trying to help me get through the myriad of issues I was facing. Anyway, I’m going to try to explain what I did to get my app up and running, hopefully this will be useful to other people trying to do the same thing.

Notes From a Weekend of Hacking

I’m piecing together a little Sinatra app that scrapes Yelp and displays schedule data for the many museums in New York. It’s an interesting exercise and has been pretty challenging so far. It’s not finished yet, but here are a few thoughts and lessons from my work:

1) rspec – I had a lot of time getting rspec working, but I found that checking all of the dependencies and essentially testing each piece of the process was the best way to troubleshoot the bugs I was getting. Once I had spec working, I actually got into the groove of writing tests and then immediately solving those tests in the models I was building. The best way to go about it is to write the tests precisely and with a narrow enough scope that they don’t seem totally overwhelming when it comes to solving them. Also .to be is not the same as .to eq. ().to be() looks for an exact object match, as opposed to eq, which looks for the contents of the object to be the same.

How Legal Is Web Scraping?"

I’ve recently learned how to perform basic web scraping using nothing but Nokogiri, Open-Uri, Ruby, a paperclip, and the internet. It’s an awesome feeling – to be able to MacGyver your way deep in to the code of a massive website and pull out exactly what you need, throw it into a database, and then manipulate that data to your heart’s content. It’s like I’ve discovered that I have a secret superpower, and am only beginning to see what I can do with it.

How I felt when I scraped my first website

But, as the cliched superhero movie line goes: Son, with great power comes great responsibility. Cue John Williams music.