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Meh, today was just one of those days, couldn’t get started so I punted on most of it. Should finish Rework tonight.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• MediaLoot – All you can eat graphic design stuffs (minus web templates/themes) it looks like for $14/mo.
• Visor – saw this used in a couple places, basically a slide down blind for terminal. Not sure I’m going to stick with this though, I like having terminal around.
• Cmd+[1-9] Tabbing in Terminal – nuff said.
• ir_black – I have the terminal theme, the vim color scheme, the textmate theme. If I could find it for limechat I’d use it there too.
• HN has a thread on the Panic Dashboard from last time with some examples of others. Looks like they were all collected here. Some really cool ideas. The collection missed the one from last.fm and 37signals.
• Unit Testing Achievements – XBox 360 Like achievements to bring some levity to django testing?
• Nimble Nodes – A way to automatically scale your Heroku dynos (and dj workers) based on dynos in use, size of the RequestQueue and some settings at nimblenodes.com. Thanks to @eladmeidar for this one.
• show_for – If the plataformatec’s team comes out with many more plugins there won’t be a whole lot left for us to do as rails developers This one helps dry up your views.
• rails and ruby chops – more screencasts for rails and ruby, another reason this is an awesome community.
• Vagrant – programatic management and creation of VirtualBox images using ruby. Looks like some really cool possibilities here, like a CI task or post-commit hook that creates an image for your QA/Marketing/etc teams.

Where do I come up with all these links?

• Mike Gunderloy’s a fresh cup
• Elad Meidar’s bag o’ links
• David Trasbo’s L33T LINKS
• Peter Cooper’s rubyflow
• I watch a bunch of tags in my delicious aggregator, URLAgg.
• Occasionally I’ll see something of note pass by on twitter, though I have to be watching one of my lists to see it, otherwise there’s just too much noise.

Rework came in yesterday and I skipped putting this out last night so I could get started on the book. I’m about halfway through, it’s a pretty quick read. I think they said it was something like 27,000 words. Every other page is an illustration or big message, so if you’re put off by the size you could picture it half as thick and that’s what you’re really reading.

I spoke with a client about their iphone app requirements and I need to put together an estimate for them soon. Seems the most effective path to take is not the Objective-C route and go with one of the alternatives (jqTouch, Titanium, Rhodes, PhoneGap). I think we’re narrowed down to Titanium and PhoneGap. Any clear winner among the two?

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• TypeWith.me – Looks like a direct copy of Pirate Pad which was a quick app that came online shortly after the folks behind EtherPad got hired by Google.
• 9 Ruby on Rails Backup Solutions + 1 from comments – If you’re not doing backups already, or looking for alternatives or just want to keep your toolbox fresh, this looks like a pretty good list.
• Run This! – execute arbitrary code in the browser as a wordpress plugin. Cool idea, not sure I want people running code on something attached to my wordpress install.
• Panic Status Board – put up their status board with explanations of the various pieces. It’s gorgeous and a really cool idea. Definitely appeals to the “big visible charts” portion of my agile soul. While we’re looking at pretty technology driven charts I have to mention Pivotal Labs’ pulse CI dashboard.

Spent some time tracking down a couple errors with mail and various transitions with acts_as_state_machine. My license to MockSMTP.app had expired so it was as good a time as any to pick one up. It’s a brilliant little app that does one thing amazingly well, and saves me loads of time in the process, win.

I’ve also been playing around with nanoc3 and nanoc3_blog a bit more. The blog bootstrap has a few nice additions already set up from nanoc. I forked it and tweaked it a bit, added a wordpress import script that I stole from someone else (credits in the commit, I need to go add them to the file) and I’m only concerned with the pre-release bits from nanoc3 atm so I just merged them into master. I guess all that’s left is to port my theme over and set up some redirects and I can be rid of wordpress for a while.

Still haven’t moved forward on niche discovery and evaluation. I have another product in the works with @ihoka so I guess my focus should be there for the near term.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• How Rudder.com Increased their Subscriber Conversion Rate by 45% – Pointed out by @pjammer.
• Getting Started with Autotest – This came up in #railsbridge earlier today and it’s one of the better writeups I’ve seen.
• Parallel Tests – Sticking with the theme, parallelize your test/spec runs. One of the projects I’m working on has several thousand specs, this could come in handy.
• mite – They’ve come out with numbers detailing their first 20 months as a startup featuring a premium-only model in a world of freemium. They’re doing well and I’m grateful for the numbers.
• Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply the “Three Layers of So What” Test – Teenage angst meets common sense, for maybe the only time. Don’t track just because you can, know why you’re tracking it and how to do better.

Woke up this morning to a 404 error to an app on a server that was trying to commit suicide. Fixed the app and tried to deploy and entered a world of hurt with the ratom gem. I think the vendored version didn’t build it’s dependencies (read: wouldn’t no many how many times I asked it to). So I rm -rf vendor/gems/ and that was the end of that problem. While I was there I upgraded from 2.3.2 to 2.3.5, added slim_scrooge and called it a day.

Somehow that retelling doesn’t really capture the emotion I was feeling. Had fun hanging out with my daughters today while my wife had a break with her friends.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• UITables with Downloaded Images – if you want to load images on a background thread, you should read this. I have an iphone app coming up and I might give Titanium a hard look.

Paired with the client today and cleaned up a pretty gnarly bit of view code. Nested attribute forms for a has_many relationship with potentially 100s or 1000s of children depending on scoping is…fun.

I’m either really snarky today or there just wasn’t much happening on the tubes because I didn’t find a whole lot.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms – we had a bit of a discussion about this in #railsbridge (irc.freenode.net) this morning about something that led to me digging up this link.

Paired some today with a client, more on the schedule tomorrow. Hopefully we can knock the feature out early for a beta on Monday.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• redcar – an open source, cross platform text editor written in JRuby hoping for TextMate bundle support. Maybe build your own TextMate2 while you’re at it, but definitely cool.
• rubex – a hostable sinatra based clone of rubular, a kick ass regex tool. The permalink feature is awesome.
• CDN Catalog – all your js are belong to the cdn and here’s a list of them.
• Genetify – javascript powered, A/B testing with a genetic algorithm. If you’re into A/B testing and don’t want (or have) a framework this is worth the look.
• 10 Simple Tips for Launching a Website – Some not so simple, some useful, but tips none-the-less.
• Google Wave Robots API v2 – wave robots can push (and create) waves now. This opens things up for what could be some really cool interaction with other sources.

These are from my delicious, subscribe if you dare

Bill paying and a conference call with a client really threw me off my game today. Then collecting daughter from school bus, getting her to dance class, dinner, etc… Long day.

I’ve been playing with nanoc, more specifically nanoc3_blog. I’m looking at it as a replacement for my current WordPress blog. There’s a WordPress Importer linked from the nanoc wiki that I’m trying to use. I’m creating a bunch of files, compiling some of them. We’ll see.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• HTML-Ipsum – another latin text generator for designer types, assuming those designer types don’t think designing with real content is better.
• S3Hub – An S3 client for Mac OS X. Nice because until now it’s been a firefox extension or few, I think.
• heartbeat – an iphone developer’s dashboard for tracking sales information.
• Designers: How to Search For, Hire, and Work With a Web-Developer – Feels like spying on the other half, like reading one of those magazine articles about “how to get your to do “. Regardless, it’s a new perspective, one not wearing OMG rockstar ninja glasses.
• One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings in Google Local – Not particularly useful for my consulting business but I know loads of local businesses that could use something like this.
• Alfa Jango Blog – has a couple articles on monitoring and tuning rails/passenger.
• The Complete iPhone Development Toolbox – this is a truly massive list of resources from tutorials to where to find developers for iPhone Apps.

Yes, I’m picking up where I left off, like nothing ever happened.

Spent some time with Meatspace Marketing today. I used Adam Salter’s sitemap_generator to help me build a decent sitemap. I wanted to have all my Organizers and Events listed for some google juice.

To make it juicier I used Norman Clarke’s friendly_id (which is awesome) so I could have organizers in my site map that looked like http://meatspacemarketing.com/organizers/prince-william-county-regional-chamber-of-commerce. And events that looked like http://meatspacemarketing.com/events/freeni-lorton-2010-03-02. Really cool stuff, I’ll never try to do this on my own again.

Interesting tidbits from around the web:

• Fetch – Before we built BDDCasts.com from scratch we looked at Spree to see if we could use rather than build. Spree was tied to a physical inventory and there were some plugins that tried to handle digital assets and infinite inventory but none of them felt right. Fetch handles digital assets and supports a ton of options for payment including Shopify and Google Checkout.
• FFF Tusj – A pretty cool font that Curtis had found.
• The Six Landing Page Conversion Rate Factors – I joined the Micropreneur Academy and Startup Todo and have been getting pretty serious about actually making money off the software I write and not just my time to write it. Lots of other things I need to figure out how to do or pay other people to do that doesn’t involve code, this is but one of them.
• kall8 – Toll Free Number for $2 month. I pay for Skype and have Google Voice so I’m not sure if it’s worth it or not, but I’ll keep it in my delicious.
• vCloud Express – an offering from Hosting.com. Not exactly the heroku model but as more of these people get into the space hopefully I can move all my apps to the cloud and not admin another box while not going broke at the same time.