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).