Assembla No Longer Free

I’ve been using Assembla for some time, and it looks like that day has now come to an end. On Friday, Assembla announced that the feature that attracted me to it in the first place is now coming to an end. Assembla will no longer be offering free, private accounts to its users. One of the really nice benefits of Assembla was the ability to have free SVN repositories. I have two Assembla accounts, and I will probably close them both. While I realize that for them this decision may simply be a matter of cutting the dead weight, for me it eliminates them as a possible candidate as a vendor in the future because I believe that I cannot determine reliably whether or not they will make additional unfavorable changes while I am paying.  I realize that their rates are fairly reasonable, but in a sense, I feel betrayed by the changes in their terms of service. They have offered a product for free. People have used the product and are somewhat dependent upon it. Now Assembla holds these users over a barrell for the sake of exacting a measly $2 a month. I really wish they would have simply grandfathered in those who currently have free, private accounts with them.

I am sympathetic to Andy’s pleas that he has a family to feed and people to pay. I can understand that. These are difficult financial times, and people need to make money. Still, the reason that I decided to use Assembla at work and personally was because it was free. I didn’t abuse the system. I didn’t fill up a subversion repository with tons of data. And I was fully committed to buying a commercial space from them if I ever got to the point where I needed one. That has changed, now. I do not feel like I can trust their bait-and-switch style of business plan, and if I can’t trust a company’s business plan, I don’t feel like I can trust them with my data.

Setting Focus in Rails with Prototype

Recently, I tried for a day to set focus on a field within a form that I had created for a Rails application. It was more difficult than you might think. So, here are my instructions for anyone else who may be trying to do this.

Rails usually comes packaged with several Javascript frameworks that can make life much easier. One of these, prototype, allows us to set focus on a field.

Here’s how you do it. In your application_helper.rb file, include the following lines:
def set_focus_to_id(id)
javascript_tag("$('#{id}').focus()");
end

In your layout either for the application or the controller, include this line in the meta section:
<%= javacript_include_tag "prototype" %>

If you wanted to include all the javascript libraries, you could include this line, but it hogs bandwidth:
<%= javacript_include_tag :defaults %>

In your rhtml file that contains the field you want to set focus on, include this line:
<%= set_focus_to_id 'password' %>
Note that your id is to be the id of the field you want to set focus on. If you are using this with a form, a fine place to insert the line is right after the end tag for the form.

That’s it. If you’ve done all that, you should have focus on the field.

HT: Wolfman