Double Shot #254

When was the last time you wrote a web app that didn't depend on some service or site that's ultimately out of your control?

• Django 1.0 Alpha Released - The folks on the other side of the fence continue to make good progress.


• RedCloth 4.0 Released - Major update to this text-processing library.


• RailsDB - Rails-based database-management tool. Version 0.3 was just released.

Double Shot #253

I have spent too much of the last few days understanding why CSS designers don't like IE6.

• Nginx Upload Module - Faster handling for uploaded files in Rails apps using nginx.


• Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu - Automatically detect and adjust for mobile browsers.


• Gist - Like Pasties, but backed by GitHub.

Double Shot #252

It was a working weekend for me, but apparently a writing weekend for lots of other folks:

• OpenX ad server API with Ruby - I could have used this a while ago.


• Little green friend - Thoughtbot is getting ready to introduce a web-based replacement for the ExceptionNotifier plugin, called hoptoad. Looks interesting.


• Inept Recruiter - The story of a technical recruiter who managed to spawn an entire Rails dev mailing list through poor use of the cc: field. I had my own inept recruiter yesterday - wanted to hire me to work at Microsoft. Um, no.


• If you work for Apple, we need your help... - The lockdown of the iPhone extends to blocking book authors. Bah.


• Authenticate like SSO with ActiveResource - One approach to letting one Rails app provide authentication services for another. I don't think we've see the end of this discussion yet.


• Blueprint 0.7 - Looking for a CSS framework. It seemed like investigating the most widely-known one was a good starting point. And indeed, using it is pretty simple.


• Bitbucket - Free (and paid) hosting for Mercurial repos. Not that I'm looking to learn another source-code management system right now, but it's good to know about.


• Blueprint Grid CSS Generator - Useful adjunct to Blueprint when you don't want or need 24 columns.


• Blueprint CSS 101 - Good (though slightly dated) overview.


• EditorKicker - Rails plugin to open your text editor to the affected file when an error happens in Rails dev.


• WICE Grid - Fancy grid/table control plugin for Rails views.

Double Shot #251

So far I'm liking Passenger more than nginx + mongrels, if only for ease of setup.

• emastic - Another CSS framework. I have the nagging feeling that I should pick and use one.


• SiteScan - Utility to check out whether you have Google Analytics installed properly.


• The Complete Guide to Setting up Starling - Help with Twitter's background processing code.

Double Shot #250

There's some chance I may start writing a RoR column for pay. I cannot escape writing work, apparently.

• 15 Resources to Get You Started with jQuery From Scratch - A nice collection of links.


• Sexy Forms in Rails - That would be ones with automatic label tags for accessibility.


• Mack 0.6.0 and Waves 0.7.7 - New releases of two of the "other" Ruby web frameworks.