Custom Titles in Rails

One thing I've learned while building rails sites is that changing things in the header on a view-by-view basis can be tricky. This starts becoming important when you start optimizing your page for Google. One thing Google likes is descriptive and non-repetitive title tags. To get view by view customized title tags try this.

1. Add `<%= yield(:title) || "Default Title" %>` to your layout inside your title tag.
2. Add `<% content_for(:title, "Custom Title") %> to your view file.

You can replace "Custom Title" with code such as `@object.name` or anything else that returns a string for even more dynamic titles. I've had to look this technique up more than once now so I'm blogging it in an effort to better remember it. I hope it is useful to you as well. You can use this technique to put other things in the header as well just use `yield` and `content_for` judiciously.