How do I defined a variable link_to to an external URL

Question

On my site a user has a personal profile with a link to his personal external website. The url of the sites I store in a postgresql database under the name website

Answer 1

I use the postrank-uri gem to normalize the url before passing it to link_to.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def normalized_webpage
    webpage && PostRank::URI.normalize(webpage).to_s
  end
end

Then you can use link_to "website", user.normalized_webpage, target: "_blank" in your view. This will for example add the http:// to the url, if it's missing.