Good notes posted by concept47

use validates :name, :presence => true instead

validates_presence_of is a holdover from the Rails 2 days.

This is the way it is done now http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations_callbacks.html#presence

link to nothing if link_to_if condition is false

When the link_to_if condition is false you can get this helper to display nothing by doing something like this

<%= link_to_if(message.user, 'Poster', message.user){} %>

^ That will display nothing if message.user does not exist.