04 Apr 2022
This newsletter went out via email to the Hotwiring Rails subscriber list, but I know that not everyone wants another email cluttering up their inbox. For those folks, I’ll always publish the full content of the newletter here too, so you can get all the content with none of the emails.
Thoughts or feedback on how I can make this newsletter more valuable? Have something you’d like to include in next month’s edition? Send me an email, or find me on Twitter.
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Three-minute read
24 Mar 2022
(This post was originally published on Indie Hackers, but I thought some of my regular blog readers might find it interesting, so I’m publishing it here, with light edits.)
One month ago I published my first ebook on Gumroad. I went into the process with absolutely no idea what I was doing, and no real idea of what to expect. I wanted to see if I could write and sell a book, so I struck out with that goal in mind and winged it all the way to the finish line.
Now that I am through the writing and publishing process, I thought others who are considering writing an ebook (especially a technical book like mine), might find value in hearing about my process along with what went well and what could have gone better.
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10-minute read
21 Mar 2022
A nearly-universal need in web applications is user notifications. An event happens in the application that the user cares about, and you inform the user of the event. A common example is in applications that have a commenting system — when a user mentions another user in a comment, the application notifies the mentioned user of that comment through email.
The channel(s) used to notify users of new important events depends on the application but the path very often includes an in-app notification widget that shows the user their latest notifications. Other common options include emails, text messages, Slack, and Discord.
Rails developers that need to add a notification system to their application often turn to Noticed. Noticed is a gem that makes it easy to add new, multi-channel notifications to Rails applications.
Today, we are going to take a look at how Noticed works by using Noticed to implement in-app user notifications. We will send those notifications to logged in users in real-time with Turbo Streams and, for extra fun, we will load user notifications inside of a Turbo Frame.
When we are finished, our application will work like this:
Before we begin, this tutorial assumes that you are comfortable building simple Ruby on Rails applications independently. No prior knowledge of Turbo or Noticed is required.
Let’s dive in!
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21-minute read