Archives for Feb 2005

autolinking google

“And consider what heat would be generated if what Google is doing to us were done to Google. Can I put up a Web app that scrapes Google and replaces their ads with mine, or adds mine to theirs?”—Dave Winer

I wonder how Google feels about the Google Preview extension for firefox?

0 comments | posted 28 Feb 07:03

Rails 0.10.0

Rails 0.10.0 is out. Notable new features include Routing (get nice looking, custom URLs without mod_rewrite), Action Web Services (check out the MetaWeblog example) with WSDL support, and Components.

Too bad it broke my rails app, though I was expecting this. It is possible to freeze your rails version though.

0 comments | posted 24 Feb 09:25

google smart tags

What’s the big deal about the Google Toolbar’s AutoLink feature?

As far as I can see, it doesn’t transform documents unless you tell it to - and you have to tell it to for each individual document. If you’re so scared about being lead off to sites owned or affiliated with Google, how about just not clicking the button? - Philip Pearson

0 comments | posted 22 Feb 07:24

No RSS? No downloads? No interaction? Fake content? You're fired!

Robert Scoble gets very passionate about RSS and marketing:

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

I can’t even fathom having a site without an RSS feed. Or a blog. But, there’s this whole world of folks that still don’t know of these things. I don’t think I know of more than five people that actually uses an aggregator or reads blogs.

Maybe that says more about where I live than anything…

0 comments | posted 19 Feb 18:08

minimal ruby blogging engine

Tobi decided to release his minimal blogging engine: typo.

It’s obviously not very feature-rich, but the source definitely has some useful little nuggets.

0 comments | posted 16 Feb 08:49

captain america vs. cobra commander

Does anyone else think that this new Captain America villain (or he may be an old one, I’m not up on my Captain America trivia) looks like a Cobra Commander wearing that weird hat from the Cosby Kids?

Ed Brubaker is the first writer to get me to actually read Captain America. The previous relaunch didn’t do much for me (the beautiful art by John Cassaday couldn’t save it). Then, there’s Cap-Wolf.

0 comments | posted 11 Feb 13:20

my first ruby on rails app...

... is still in progress. Here’s the latest report from running rake stats:

Code LOC: 996 Test LOC: 1191 Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.2

I picked a doozy of a project, a comic book database. I’m not ready to post a link to the dev version until I have a decent layout up. If any shit-hot designer wants to help in that aspect, let me know.

0 comments | posted 11 Feb 07:23

joel on software

I just finished reading Joel’s dead tree version of Joel on Software. Even though I’ve read most, if not all, of the articles, they were definitely worth another read.

Plus, it’s in a format that you can read in the bathroom that doesn’t affect your fertility.

(Scott Mitchell wrote a much better review)

0 comments | posted 07 Feb 13:32

Sorry. Works fine in IE, though.

don’t use backslashes in your URLs.

0 comments | posted 03 Feb 15:13

i got my hash pipe

Eric Lippert has a great three part series (1, 2, 3) on why you should implement a salted hash user authentication system in your apps.

The only issue is there’s no way to retrieve the password if the user needs it. It’s not a show stopper if you provide a method to reset the user’s password and require them to change it upon logging back in.

0 comments | posted 03 Feb 08:53

sitepoint

I was over at Sitepoint and noticed something odd: They changed the middle mouse click icon! I didn’t realize it was even possible to be modified by a website.

It’s also one of the few sites that gets through Firefox’s popup blocker.

0 comments | posted 03 Feb 07:19