• Rails and Merb Merge: ORM Agnosticism (part 5 of 6) - A good article on the de-coupling of ActiveRecord from Rails.
• The Skinny on Scopes (Formerly named_scope) - Using the new scope feature in Rails 3.
• The Maintainability of Unit Tests - As far as testing goes, this is probably the best advice for those who are unsure what to test.
• You Are What You Charge - Great advice for freelancers.

Let's ease into the New Year with a couple of my favourites from the last week:

1. Subdomains and sessions to the rescue - A detailed look at adding subdomains (including testing!) to your Rails app.
2. Protip: Passing parameters to your Rake tasks - I so need this for a Sinatra app I'm working on!
3. Your pages will load faster with Rails! - Some tips on getting faster page loads.

1. Ruby community survey - Thoughtbot are doing an end of year survey on how developers coding practices. If you've got 5 minutes, fill it out.
2. Debugging Rule #1: It's your fault! - Applications only do what they're told to do, so it's pointless trying to prove otherwise. I hope there's more of these soon!
3. Top 15+ Best Practices for Writing Super Readable Code - I tend to avoid these posts as I'm quite happy with my coding practices. Read this if your new to programming in general or you want a quick refresher.
4. Production Rails Tuning with Passenger: PassengerMaxProcesses - Awesome guide to getting the most out of Passenger on your application server.
5. LinkedIn Gem for Web App - Quick guide to authenticating a user in a controller using the LinkedIn gem. Lots of potential for this gem in the right application.

1. My top 7 RSpec best practices - I'm still using Test::Unit and Factory Girl, but might need to add RSpec to my toolkit as well.
2. Rack::Shell - A console for any Rack based ruby web application.

1. Nestor: A Butler for your tests - A new continuous testing server for Rails.
2. Metaprogramming in Ruby: It's all about self - A great breakdown of metaprogramming in Ruby. It's this side of Ruby that has always puzzled me.
3. Sinatra from Rails - A Rails plugin that will convert your application to a Sinatra application. Handy if you have created a small Rails application that has only one or two resources, and would be more suited to Sinatra.

1. Launching Ruby on Rails projects, the video - Robby Russell's talk from Rails Underground is now available as a video.
2. Absolute dates make tests brittle - Great little tip if your using fixtures to test your Rails app.
3. Ninja testing your Rails plugins - I'll be using this guide to write my first plugin soon. 

1. You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku - John Nunemaker has seen the light with Heroku and there's also a great tip if you want your Heroku apps to use MongoDB.
2. Behaviour driven infrastructure through Cucumber - An interesting idea to verify that your application is installed correctly.
3. A meditation for the (aspiring) Rubyist - Great advice for those looking to understand Ruby through practical exercises.
4. Creating a Twitter Clone in Rails (Part 4) - Watch the fun ramblings of Eric Berry as he styles his Twitter clone application using CSS. Be sure to check out the other parts in the series!

Mike Gunderloy posted a little snippet of Ruby code that let's you use Test::Unit 2.0 in your Rails project, without screwing up the Rails project for anyone else still using Test::Unit 1.0.

1. Three reasons to love ActionController::Responder - 3 examples of the how the new Responder can be used.
2. Sharing is caring - A nice little directory convention for your next Rails project. Anyone built this into a template yet?
3. Ruby unit test frameworks - Sarah Allen has been assessing 3 testing frameworks for teaching purposes.
4. Simplifying Rails Block Helpers (With a Side of Rubinus) - A look at the process behind implementing another of Merb's features in Rails.
5. Focusing Autotest - This is great. A helper that lets you run Autotest on one test at a time. Great for working on single tests.