A feature for an internal Ruby project here at Quick Left necessitated parsing the domain from a URL. This seems like a problem for which there must already exist a solution, but it surprisingly turns out that there is no available solution for this seemingly simple task.

I recently wrote a blog post describing how to create your own RubyGem. The sample gem produced, aptly named dogeify, converts English sentences into "Doge" based upon the recently popular meme. For April Fools' Day, we thought it would be fun to implement this gem to convert our entire site into doge. Here's how we did it.

Building your first Ruby gem may seem like a daunting task, but it's actually not so bad. It's quite rewarding to not only release a gem, but to see its download count climb as others put your hard work to good use, and even still as others offer to contribute new features and bug fixes to your very own gem. And thanks to RubyGems.org and Bundler, the process of creating, releasing, and implementing gems couldn't be easier.

Implementing forms that are associated with models -- specifically ActiveRecord objects -- is pretty common when developing with Ruby on Rails. In fact, the built-in FormHelper assumes that you're working with some kind of persisted object.

But what happens when you want to create a form for something that is not persisted by an ActiveRecord model?