A lot of people are discussing the demise of the newspaper industry. Which appears to be imminent. So, here is some advice for anyone in charge of a newspaper: If you are selling something that people can get for free, you are going to fail. Let’s see how newspapers stack up...
By default the command line utility for testing Ruby code, called irb, doesn’t remember any history from previous sessions. This means if you type some commands into irb and then close it, the next time you launch irb you have to completely retype all those commands. Which is a pain in...
Some websites I have found interesting (in no particular order): Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering: I’ve been wondering for a little while why this isn’t more built into frameworks like Django and Rails. It makes perfect sense! (Though I was going to try it with PHP) User friendly popup...
Some websites I have found interesting (in no particular order): Loading Scripts Without Blocking: Goes through all the options for including your external javascript files. I had no idea there were so many options! Piston: This looks like exactly what I was missing from Django. The First Rule for Software Development:...
Two big programming related things have happened to me, recently: Twice have people that I don’t know found code I have written useful! The first was the developer behind Directory Watcher, who found my fork of his project useful, and used it as a jumping point for his lastest version. If...
Some websites I have found interesting (in no particular order): Fuck the Foundries: Seriously, what makes them think they are any different than the music industry, movie industry or newspaper industry? Birdfeeder: Distributed Twitter. About time! I’ve been wanting this for a while....
I read Alex Payne’s Why I don’t Allow Comments and More on Everything Buckets not too long ago and was almost convinced to completely throw about my ideas for javascript commenting on this site and just leave it as it is. I do very much agree with Alex’s main point: I...
Some websites I have found interesting (in no particular order): GeoIP: Simple and to the point, give it an IP Address and it will give you a pretty good guess for where in the world it correspondes to. Lightweight Web Services: A talk about the Sinatra web framework and the RestClient...
For a new project I started recently, I have been using a Ruby gem called Directory Watcher, which does just what it says: It watches directories! Specifically, it watches for changes to files. Even more specificaly, adding, modifying and deleting files. It is pretty simple, from the docs: require 'directory_watcher' dw...
Some websites I have found interesting (in no particular order): When Can I use…: Pretty awesome website with information on when cool HTML 5 features will be implemented in browsers. Mandatory alt attribute is insignificant: Why are we discussing this still? It shouldn’t be mandatory because a site’s users aren’t necessarily...