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

• Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster With Top Aligned Labels | UXMovement.com – put your form fields in a list, with labels on top and your users can fill them out faster. so this says.
• 10 Mistakes That Start-Up Entrepreneurs Make – WSJ.com – Spending too much time on product development, not enough on sales, that one really resonates
• Building a Standing Workstation – Hacks – another diy walkstation
• Is there a good jQuery plugin or JS code for time durations? – Stack Overflow – another hit on parsing integer to time in javascript this one in jquery
• Datejs – An open-source JavaScript Date Library – This came up in #railsbridge, looking for a way to parse int to time duration

Interesting tidbits from around the web (August 3rd):

• WCCC Production Systems Status Board | Inside the Mind of Sators – More dashboard inspiration
• Jonathan Oxer: Building a Status Screen, part 3: Display – Blog – Jon has a whole series on building a panic inspired dashboard
• Ecommerce Dashboard on TV | Flickr – Photo Sharing! – another dashboard example, going to have to put my own together rsn.
• Arrivals | Development Status | Cultured Code – One of the status boards that started it all

Interesting tidbits from around the web (July 12th):

• Design for iPad – loads of resources for design on the ipad
• Happy customers through an improved checkout « Boagworld – Lots of suggestions on how to make your checkout forms better for the user
• bgetting’s hominid at master – GitHub – want to bake this into BrandPulse (http://getbrandpulse) so I can set up drip campaigns for trial users so they get the most out of the 30 day free trial
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development – the "cheat sheet to the 4 steps to the ephiphany"
• ariejan’s firefly at master – GitHub – FireFly is a simple URL shortner for personal use.
• Grasscove – Another remote log viewer for osx.

Interesting tidbits from around the web (June 8th):

• Rogue Amoeba | Freebies: Free Software for Mac OS X – sound source is worth it here, lets you switch audio sources (input and output). really handy for going from line out to mic. thanks to @joebeninghove for the tip
• Anti-Social – Mac/OS X Social Networking Block Software – block access to know time sinks
• About Pages: Good, Bad, and Missing | UX Booth – answer the questions you learned in grade school, who what when where why (how I guess, if you want to)
• BohConf: The Best Ruby Conference Ever – The Majestic Sea Creature – ugh. replacing the valve body in my milan or I'd be commuting for this.
• Reducing the load on a small VPS by 80% in 5 minutes | TurnKey Linux Blog – rationale and tips for reducing prefork tasks/workers
• 11 UI Kits for iPhone and iPad Development | Freebies – psd's and such for iPhone and iPad
• Notion Ink Adam delayed until this November | BestTabletReview.com – Dammit the Adam may be dead. iPad is looking better and better.

Interesting tidbits from around the web (June 7th):

• Fat Free CRM on Heroku – Saturn Flyer – running fat free crm on heroku
• Steve Gill’s Blog » Blog Archive » Converting an iPhone PhoneGap app to a Palm PhoneGap app in 10 minutes – complete with video
• NodeJS Tutorial with CouchDB and Haml – ErdNodeFlips – A tutorial for creating a basic Node JS application. Using Node, CouchDB and Haml
• Rails Performance Needs an Overhaul – igvita.com – some comments on the state of the stack
• Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.02 released – Phusion Corporate Blog – another release of REE
• Understanding the Unobtrusive JavaScript technique – Simone Carletti’s Blog – UJS for dummies. Author's words, not mine.
• The Elegant Ruby Web Framework – Padrino Ruby Web Framework – Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the excellent Sinatra Microframework.
• Labnotes » My development stack – Assaf's current development stack. Never heard of pipemaster…
• Ruby Unroller – code tracing tool for ruby
• 8 tips for making ambush ‘guerilla user testing’ clip reel videos – how to stitch clips together from all your user testing
• 10 tips for ‘ambush guerilla user testing’ – tips for getting out among the humans in meatspace to do user testing

Interesting tidbits from around the web (May 25th):

• Learn LabView –
• Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and Note-Taking PDF Templates – Smashing Magazine –
• Paper Browser: It’s a Browser only in Paper –
• Rethinking Cron –
• iPad as desktop status monitor –
• PhoneTell Adds Caller ID and Canned SMS Responses to Android –
• A List Apart: Articles: Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing –
• Inductor :: Mount Rack apps in Rails 3 –

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.

Spent some time on code coverage this morning for Project G, refactored some really ugly bits out of the view and back into the controller and sometimes model. No, Project M didn’t sneak out over the weekend, I need to add search and it’ll be my 1.0.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• In praise of demos – You spend all this time writing code, you ought to invest a few hours for someone to actually be able to try it out. We set up http://demo.bddcasts.com/ there’s no authentication so you can add Brands and Search Terms, we reset the database to a known state before we hit twitter. We didn’t want to let a spammer burn through our API calls, probably should put this off to it’s own post.
• Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices – Some common sense, some interesting nuggets.
• Link LinkedIn into your next Ruby application – Yes, he probably could have used link or in one or two more times in the title. Be interesting to see what people do with this.
• Built In Book Cases – These look really slick, I’d like to do this in my basement at some point.
• Review of Easy and Inexpensive Tools for Usability Testing – Turned up a few I hadn’t seen before.
• VPS Performance Comparison – Pretty thorough comparison. Still, someone needs to build a slider tool like heroku has and then show what it costs across the cloud/vps hosts around.

Updated my blog and plugins this morning, so that’s been taken care of for the next month or so. Also cleaned my gems, which wasn’t an awesome idea, but I survived. Made some more progress on Project M, should definitely be out this weekend.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• IntuitionHQ – Another resource for usability testing.
• 15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online – A roundup of free stock photo sources.
• The Bare Bones That Every Freelance Contract Should Have – More contract resources for freelancers without one, or those with one that want to make sure they got a good lawyer
• Calibre – mac + calibre + prs-505 = a happy reader. Site seems to have gotten a facelift recently, but I’m not sure the last time I’ve been out there.
• Amazing jQuery tables – more jquery table goodness (the screenshot for the highlight doesn’t do anything for me).
• How To Deal with Non-Paying Clients – Luckily I haven’t had to deal with too many of these. Though I question #4. After all this nonsense you’re going to include “…would hope you would not hesitate to contact us in the future…”. Gluttons for punishment?

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.