I wanted to create a route that could accept an URL as a parameter. The problem was that dots and slashes were interpreted as separators for the route. Luckily I managed to find this post that explained how it could be bypassed.

   1  map.connect ':scale/:text.:format', :controller => 'barcode', :requirements => { :text => /.*/ }

With this route set up I now could catch parameters like this: http://localhost:3000/200×200/http://aktagon.com.png, where 200×200 is :scale, http://aktagon.com is :text and .png is :format.

   1  def minutes_in_words(timestamp)
   2      minutes = (((Time.now - timestamp).abs)/60).round
   3      
   4      return nil if minutes < 0
   5      
   6      case minutes
   7        when 0..4            then '&lt; 5 minutes'
   8        when 5..14           then '&lt; 15 minutes'
   9        when 15..29          then '&lt; 30 minutes'
  10        when 30..59          then '&gt; 30 minutes'
  11        when 60..119         then '&gt; 1 hour'
  12        when 120..239        then '&gt; 2 hours'
  13        when 240..479        then '&gt; 4 hours'
  14        when 480..719        then '&gt; 8 hours'
  15        when 720..1439       then '&gt; 12 hours'
  16        when 1440..11519     then '&gt; ' << pluralize((minutes/1440).floor, 'day')
  17        when 11520..43199    then '&gt; ' << pluralize((minutes/11520).floor, 'week')
  18        when 43200..525599   then '&gt; ' << pluralize((minutes/43200).floor, 'month')  
  19        else                      '&gt; ' << pluralize((minutes/525600).floor, 'år')
  20      end
  21    end

1. http://www.actsasflinn.com/articles/2007/04/10/time-ago-method-for-ruby-on-rails
2. http://timeago.yarp.com/

• Google – Googlebot/2.1 ( http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
• Google Image – Googlebot-Image/1.0 ( http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
• MSN Live – msnbot-Products/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
• Yahoo – Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp;)

The code (via):

   1  user_agent = request.user_agent.downcase
   2  @bot = [ 'msnbot', 'yahoo! slurp','googlebot' ].detect { |bot| user_agent.include? bot }

When the Google bot visists your site the @bot string will contain ‘googlebot’.

If you need to detect more bots than these, then the user-agents.org site contains a list of various user agents for both bots and browsers.

Option 1: Changing your browser’s user agent

Open the about:config page in Firefox by typing about:config in the address bar and pressing enter. Now change the general.useragent.extra.firefox setting to an easily identifiable string, for example the following:

   1  Firefox/3.0 disable-tracking

Then in your code check that the user-agent string doesn’t contain disable-tracking>

   1  <% if !request.user_agent.include?('disable-tracking') %>
   2  TRACKING CODE GOES HERE
   3  <% end %>

Option 2:

Use one of Google Analytics native ways of excluding traffic from certain domains, IPs, user-agents or users having a specific browser cookie.

Autotest sucks by default up all the cpu cycles. I found a solution for it here.

Add this to $HOME/.autotest

   1  Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
   2    at.sleep = 5
   3  end