Interesting Things

• Rails gotcha: if you want to use a column in the database to order your records, don’t name that column “order”. Plus, you can get this functionality almost for free by using acts_as_list, which uses a column named “position.”
• If you are referencing RFC 822 “Internet Message Format” to do such things as validating the format of an email address, that RFC has been replaced with RFC 2822. The most notable change is that addresses are not valid if they do not specify the top level domain (.com, .net, etc.). Example:
  • joe@pivotallabs — Not valid
  • joe@pivotallabs.com — valid

We had to update validates_as_email to support this. We’ll submit a patch.

• Oh yeah… xpath is 1-based, not 0-based. That gets us every time.