I’m learning a bit about Ruby on Rails. It’s fun. But this afternoon I looked around for a simple way to put a slider into a form. I found some jQuery sliders. I did lots of stuff: learned how to convert Javascript to Coffeescript the lazy automated way, learned something about putting labels on this jQuery slider, this, that, other. And I couldn’t get my page to save the output of the slider. And while looking up how to do that, I discovered range_field. The slider’s already built in to Ruby on Rails, and in a better way than this silly jQuery slider, and it worked right away.

How do we learn these things at the beginning? I looked up sliders in forms and there are apparently a lot of people building Javascript sliders for Ruby on Rails apps when half the time it’s there already!