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Interesting tidbits from around the web (August 26th):

• The Three Key Elements of Irresistible Email Subject Lines | Copyblogger – how to craft an email subject line to get your audience to open it
• Mac indie dev asks The Pirate Bay to keep a torrent of his software – Crazy mac dev wants his cracked software torrent kept on pirate bay to make fun of crackers inability, and because he wants people to see the true beauty of his software (and even asks for a true crack).
• YouTube – The William – Never thought I'd bookmark a stove, but this is damn cool.
• Keynote Wireframe Toolkit – Get your Keynote Kung-Fu on – Cool wiring framing stencils for keynote, $12. Damn can this site sell a product or what? Slide share slides are awesome.
• Hanchor LLC | Introducing iOS Beta Builder – small mac app to help with beta deployment of iOS apps
• Keyword Questions – Keyword Research Tool – find out what questions people are asking based on keyword searches

Interesting tidbits from around the web (July 23rd):

• Sauce Labs – Selenium-based Downloads, Hosting and Support – in the cloud cross-browser testing with selenium.
• Continuous Deployment, Code Review and Pre-Tested Commits on Digg4 | Digg About – Digg talks about how they're doing continuous deployment and mention tools too.
• Pricing – Harmony Website Management – Harmony is finally being opened up to the public. They've announced pricing.
• Chromium Updater | Sean’s Bloggity – My last updater clobbered itself and chromium, so I killed it and was using the updater plugin, but that's a manual process. So I found this, modified it a bit to be a little more generic and threw it into my dotfiles (http://github.com/jschoolcraft/dotfiles)

Interesting tidbits from around the web (July 1st):

• Uses of Systematization for Freelancers – I need more systems. Love to hear about any freelancers/biz owners have that are vital.
• 5 Tips for Starting a Fresh Work Week | The Daily Grid – some good ideas to get off on the right foot Monday morning.
• The Road to Passenger 3: Technology Preview 3 – Closing the gap between development and production & rethinking the word “easy” – Phusion Corporate Blog – Wow, passenger lite looks pretty cool.

Interesting tidbits from around the web (June 24th):

• How Zynga Uses Minimum Viable Products & Ghetto Testing | Grattisfaction – Mark Pincus talks about how Zynga uses minimum viable products to test demand so they don't waste time. Need to listen to the podcast.
• The Anatomy of an Effective Product Sales Page | Josh Klein’s Blog – an interesting dissection of the sales page for the 4HWW
• The Social Internet Survey Software & Online Survey Tool – They have the respondents, you provide the survey and get feedback.
• Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online service, step-by-step – more ways to determine if you have a market for a viable product
• How to test the viability of your online business idea | Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli – a run through of testing your product before it exists as described in 4HWW.
• Phusion Passenger 2.2.15 released – Phusion Corporate Blog – another release of passenger
• 20 Nao Robots Perform Awesome 8 Minute Dance Routine at Shanghai Expo (video) | Singularity Hub – No small feat. First 90 seconds aren't as interesting because it's all identical movements. Then the video starts getting into some individual movements and it's pretty amazing.
• Shapado – questions & answers – the site for the stack overflow clone, hosted, with plans.
• FAQ Pages: Best Practices and Examples – Noupe – sooner or later everything gets a FAQ
• Sencha – Sencha Touch Overview – HTML5 Mobile App Framework – Sencha Touch, an HTML5 mobile app framework for developing web apps with native look-and-feel on Apple iOS and Google Android touchscreen devices.
• Mac Media Center – Setup any Mac as a Media Center Easily – OS X Daily – another reason to try to find a refurb or used mini.
• Create Your Own Programming Language – @edavis10 mentioned this book, so I'm keeping track of it.
• meskyanichi’s deployer at master – GitHub – Deployer is gem that enhances Capistrano to simplify the deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. Surprised there aren't more like this.

Interesting tidbits from around the web (May 20th through May 24th):

• cjohansen’s twibot at master – GitHub – Simple framework for creating Twitter bots, inspired by Sinatra
• jbarnette’s isolate at master – GitHub – Gem segregation.
• Alan deLevie – Feature Flippers with Rails – lets a site admin deploy/rollback features from a simple dashboard with a single click
• 50+ Online Generators for Designers and Web Developers – W3Mag –
• Riding Rails: Ruby on Rails 2.3.7 Released – a couple of bug fixes for rails_xss
• Make Your Own Bookmarklets With jQuery – Smashing Magazine –
• Store | Konigi – The 5 1/4" floppy sketch book looks pretty cool.
• Soovle – Let the web help. –
• 2379 Free Web Design Icons | IconsPedia – maybe you can have too many icons
• 5 Basic Usability Breakdowns You Want to Avoid :: Echo Enduring Blog –
• Small Business SEO – 7 Essential Tips for Success – Online Marketing Blog –
• habitforge – Forge new habits. Change your life! –
• 6 Quick Tips to Search Twitter Like an Expert –
• Ingestible Surgical Robots—Hard To Swallow Concept? | Singularity Hub – No, it’s not a LEGO space station. This is ARES, the self-assembling robot you may someday have to swallow.
• schacon’s showoff at master – GitHub – the best damn presentation software a developer could ever love

Spent some time hacking away on project MSM. Was trying to get it pushed out to heroku today but I’m losing that fight. Has something to do with compass, sass and sass-on-heroku. I’ve moved compass out of the gem manifest, put it in environments/development.rb, wrapped the initializer with a check for Rails.env == “development”. I’m storing the generated css in git to push it across. I’ll play with it tomorrow I guess. Might be related to where compass likes to store sass and output the generated css.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

Still not sure whether to watch github repos, follow the authors, or bookmark them in delicious.

• fancy-buttons – Fancy CSS buttons using compass
• Designing CSS Buttons – Lots to say about buttons today.
• readernaut – in beta, found while trying to solve my heroku problems, oddly enough. Social reading. Here’s the 100 Best Books of the Decade (according to TimesOnline) to get you started. In case you were wondering, The DaVinci Code was #10.
• FFb3- Another beta, another opportunity. Still not happy with tabs and firefox, mostly restoring tabs, I won’t be trying until after I’m done here. This is why I care if they get restored.
• 7 Tips To Make Your Web Site Mobile-friendly – Browsed a couple of my sites on the Droid, and I have a pretty sizable display, there’s plenty of work for me to do in this area.
• MacRuby 0.5b2 – Keeps moving along, want to play with this at some point, soon I hope.
• Passenger 2.2.7 – WordPress updates, passenger update, going to be a server admin party in someone’s future.