rbates

This reminds me of the party game Telestrations where players go back and forth between drawing and writing what they see. It's hilarious to see the result because you anticipate what the next drawing will be while reading the prompt.

I'd love to see an alternative viewing mode here which shows the image and the following prompt. Then you need to click a button to reveal the next image. This allows you to picture in your mind what the image might like while reading the prompt.

Thanks for making this fun little app!

Update: I just realized you can get this effect by going into mobile mode (or resizing the window). You can then scroll down to see the image after reading the prompt.

Thanks! Glad to help.

All is better. I still plan to blog about the burnout.

I wouldn't expect to be mentioned in the documentary, but thanks for the shout out. :)

Thank you all for the kind comments! The Rails community has always been supportive to me. Even criticisms were done in a constructive manner.

I will go into detail on why I stopped RailsCasts in part 3, but I will say it wasn’t because of the community. You all have been awesome.

Graded Go Problems for Beginners

A bit of a cheat answer. The book here represents the game of Go. I found getting into this hobby helped in problem solving other areas of my life since it exercises analyzing many branching paths.

There are often too many possibilities to try every one, so it requires intuition to narrow down the good options, and then you can visualize how it might play out.

Kent Beck wrote up a workflow along these lines called test && commit || revert. The idea is any change that makes the tests pass is committed, any change that makes the tests fail is reverted. https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/test-commit-revert-870bbd7...

I believe Kent has also posted a few videos on YouTube demonstrating this approach.

A couple more suggestions:

- Option to lock scrolling so they both scroll at the same time.

- Button to flip them in place to help see the differences.

Interesting, I ended up with Fira Mono and my current font is also DejaVu Sans Mono which I also like better. The @ sign does it for me.

Reliability isn't as good for me as the 2015 MacBook Pro. My 2019 16" doesn't register presses that are near the edge of the keys like the 2015 model did. Perhaps it's related to the travel distance. It is my biggest issue with the 16".

Update 2: To help make amends, DigitalOcean donated $5,000 to an open source project of my choice. I chose Stimulus Reflex. Nate and team have done an amazing job. What a classy move DO, thanks!

Update: DigitalOcean sent a thoughtful apology and is willing to continue sponsoring RailsCasts. While I do appreciate their years of sponsorship in the past, I have no plans to go back.

Well, since you asked for details, here they are. :)

I posted a separate comment at the root with details.

Here are the details for those interested:

I received an automated email September 2 stating charges were accumulating on my sponsored DigitalOcean account. This has happened in the past so I assumed it was a fault due to changes in their billing system.

I couldn't find a contact that still worked at the company, so I opened a support ticket on September 5 asking if they were willing to continue sponsorship. I received a response the same day stating they informed the CSM team and one would reach out to me.

I didn't receive a response from that team until October 6. In the meantime I received constant automated emails stating my account was overdue. I emailed them a couple times concerned about this and they stated "Please don’t worry about immediate account suspension."

The reason they gave for stopping sponsorship was "DigitalOcean recently stopped providing a small group of accounts free access but given RailsCasts history with us, I am requesting an exception be made."

We setup a Google hangout meeting on October 15 to discuss renewal and concluded I may qualify for an annual credit under their open source program. I told them I would need a little time to evaluate the requirements of the app since it doesn't receive as much traffic as it used to.

On October 21 at 4 AM my account was suspended automatically due to overdue payment. When I woke up and saw this I emailed them and they reactivated my account an hour later and moved the deadline to Nov 10.

After further discussions we concluded a $360 credit would work for the next year at a new droplet size. I asked "Is it possible to start the $360 credit on November 10 and clear the existing balance at that time? Currently it says my account owes $654, not certain where that number came from."

They responded "I will reach out to our billing team about this. It looks like a majority of the $654 due is what your account has accrued over time. I will work to clear the balance from before the free status was turned off."

I responded "Considering there was no warning that the free status would be turned off, is it possible to clear the balance after I've transitioned to the smaller droplet (by November 10)? There's still a balance for this month which will be around $80."

They responded "It looks like communication was sent out from DO on 7/17 regarding Railscast's free account status being turned off on 9/1."

I could find no record of that email in my Gmail account. I asked for a copy of the email and they said "It looks like the email was sent from success@info.digitalocean.com to your RailsCast email on 7/17/2020. If you have unsubscribed from DigitalOcean emails in the past, this could explain why you did not receive the communication."

Apparently the email was sent through their promotional channels which I am unsubscribed from. I was receiving other emails regarding billing but never received a notice of the sponsorship ending.

They also stated "$558.68 out of the $654.68 was from the usage your account consumed before being set free in 2014. In order to avoid suspension, the balance will need to be paid off by 11/10."

I gave evidence that the $558.68 was a fault of their invoicing system and my account was free from the beginning. In fact, I have an email from a DigitalOcean co-founder stating my account would be setup with "a lifetime of credits". I can understand if they didn't want to be committed to this statement from 8 years ago, but at least be up front about it and don't charge me for something I never agreed to.

They stated "As an act of good faith, I will work with finance to provide a credit towards the balance ($558.68) you previously owed before having your account marked free."

A few days later the deadline was approaching. I asked for an update on this but did not receive any response. By this time my total account balance showed $749.62 which it appeared I needed to pay before Nov 10 in order to avoid the site going down again. That weekend I decided to move the app over to Linode.

On November 9 I received an email from them stating they cleared the $558.68 but "You will still need to pay for your September and October consumption ($190.94). If you do not pay by tomorrow, you run the risk of your account be suspended and losing access to your data."

I was not happy with this result. The $190.94 was largely due to me waiting on them during the discussions. Each response from them would take a few days up to a week to get back. I don't feel right about promoting a business which charges someone for something they never agreed to.

This is when I tweeted that railscasts.com has moved over to Linode. Later that day I received an automated email from DigitalOcean granting my account $1,150.00 credit. I emailed this morning asking about this but haven't heard back yet. While I appreciate the gesture, I have no plans to be sponsored by DigitalOcean again.

It's a long story, but in summary: they pulled sponsorship without notifying me, charged me for hosting while I asked what was going on (they took forever to respond), and shut down the site for a few hours during discussions when they assured me they wouldn't. I have been unable to reason with them and decided I cannot promote a company who does business in this way.

I plan to cover more billing/payment topics in future Pro episodes, thanks for the suggestion!

Sorry for the downtime, there was an unrelated DDOS attack on my host's network. http://status.linode.com/

If you are having trouble subscribing, please let me know. ryan@railscasts.com

Also, PayPal support will be coming soon which should make signup easier for international.

I want to keep the experience the same as possible with the free episodes without losing any conveniences such as browsing the source code. If one finds the source code interesting, hopefully he will subscribe to watch the video too.

I am talking with Eifion to integrate ASCIIcasts more into RailsCasts. Keep an eye out for that.

I've gathered up the changelog entries into a gist: https://gist.github.com/958283

Thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood your post as saying GitHub's project pages don't rank well in Google in general. I agree that a custom project page allows you to better target other keywords (such as "authorization") for SEO.

I disagree that GitHub's project pages "suck for SEO". GitHub's pages rank quite highly on Google. A search for "cancan" for example returns my project as the first result. A search for "homebrew" returns GitHub's page as the 3rd result and the custom project page as the 4th result.

Also, creating a separate page for a project means there will no longer be one page for people to link to. Links will be split across the two pages, and links are important for SEO.

I agree a separate project page is great for branding and makes it look like a dedicated, serious project; but I wouldn't do it for SEO purposes.

Otherwise thanks for the great list of ideas.

There are very serious security blunders here, but I wouldn't go as far as the article to say it needs a complete overhaul. Here are a few example fixes.

1. Most of the XSS errors should be handled by Rails 3 auto-escaping. I'm not certain why this isn't happening. It may be a simple HAML config error or bug.

2. The session key should be moved out of the Git repo.

3. Most of the authorization can be done by reaching through the current user's associations. For example "current_user.photos.destroy" would prevent users from destroying other's photos.

I'm not defending the developers here and agree these should not have gotten past them. My point is these problems can be fixed in a few days, and thanks to open source, there are many eyes looking at the code to find additional security issues.