When Rails prints a backtrace in HTML, it's helpfully rendered as a "txmt:" link so that users can click open the corresponding location in TextMate on OS X. If you're an Emacs user, here's how to make those URLs open in Emacs instead.

'less' is a great tool for browsing Rails log files, though you might not guess it if you try to view your "development.log" with it.

Our big celebrity charity news site runs on Rails, and I've just switched all the view code from erb to haml. I cut the total number of lines of view code from 2370 to 1788, which makes for a saving of 25%.

I'm happy to announce that my db_console plugin for Rails has just been added to Rails Core.

Want to mark external links on your website with a little icon or a different colour? Well, you'll want to give all those <a> tags a CSS class, and style them up accordingly. In this article I present an easy way to do this without directly altering all the links in your application, exactly as I implemented it on this popular celebrity charity news site.

If you work in a team on a Rails project, chances are that you and your team mates occasionally create identically-numbered migrations. Renumbering a migration that you're working on is a pain, unless you're using this handy 'renumber_migrations' plugin.

Tired of PID files, needing root access, and writing init scripts just to have your UNIX apps start when your server boots? Want a simpler, better alternative that will also restart them if they crash? If so, then read this quick-start introduction to process supervision with runit/daemontools.

Ever tried using 'psql' or 'mysql' on the command-line to connect to your Rails database, only to find you forgot how to specify all those '-u' and '-h' parameters?

This plugin provides handy rake tasks for running DB console programs for the various databases in your database.yml. It supports postgresql, mysql, sqlite and sqlite3 connections.

Ruby On Rails has a Subversion repository with over 7500 commits at the time of writing. In this article I show how you can use Git to have a full local copy of the repository in 9MB, and use it to track upstream changes.

In a subsequent article I will show you how to use such a repository to easily maintain Rails patches for the six months it takes you to get them accepted into Core (wink).