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

• stJhimy – Rails 3, Ruby and JQuery documentation into Mac OS Dictionary – via stjhimy.com updated osx dictionary files for rails 3, ruby and jquery. …
• Premium WordPress Themes | Elegant Themes – via elegantthemes.com Looks like another good, affordable source of wordpress themes. …
• Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 Schedule – Confreaks, LLC – via confreaks.net Lots of "coming soon" videos, but they have a link to Glenn Vanderburg's "Real Software Engineering" that got a bunch of positive press on twitter during the ruby #ho …
• How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea | Ramblings of a Web Startup in Progress . . . – I am a big fan this whole “minimum viable product” philosophy. I’ve probably adapted it to my own interpretation, but basically I look at it as bootstrapping on crack, get your product out with …
• Google Wave Gets Server/Web Client – Linux Magazine Online – For everyone that thought Wave was in the ground, buried, there might be life yet. Wave in a box.
• UniversityTutor Races Past 200 Paying Customers – via startbreakingfree.com Brian share's his 2 year journey to more than 200 paying customers for his SaaS app. …
• Slaying dragons with git, bash, and ruby – Ruby Pond – An often over-looked feature when using git are the various hooks you have available. They cover pre-applypatch, post-update, and anything between or beyond. I suspect a lot of people may have …
• How to Make Client-Converting Pages That Sell | Jaime Mintun – via jaimemintun.com Tips on how to make a good landing page. …

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

• Testing the concept: how we decide on the next killer app | Go Tripod – Figuring out which idea to work on next
• Top 10 Most Important Pages Every Blog Or Website Should Have – decent list of "standard" pages for your website/blog
• Social Media Icon Sets (free) – a ton of social media icon sets
• WordPress › Easy Privacy Policy « WordPress Plugins – adsense privacy policy plugin, who knew
• WordPress › Pretty Link « WordPress Plugins – Another plugin to consider adding to the mix

Interesting tidbits from around the web (June 17th):

• 7 Amazing Presentation Slides to Teach you How to Code with jQuery | web enavu – need to spend some time here
• Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: WooThemes – (37signals) – The next in the series.

Interesting tidbits from around the web (June 5th):

• Robert Escriva’s Blog – recording of a lecture Robert gave on Using git
• Google Trends – for niche research
• Press75.com | Exceptional WordPress Themes – more wp themes

Interesting tidbits from around the web (May 30th):

• Using WordPress Pages like a Pro – how to use Pages in WordPress for marketing, sales, promotion, and information-sharing in smart and unique ways.
• Scaling Threaded Comments on Django at Disqus | David Cramer’s Blog – recursive queries in pg. this is where database agnosticism falls down. hard.

Feels like a long day today, getting up at 3:45a probably has something to do with that. Prepared a bunch of food to take down to my parents for Thanksgiving tomorrow, should be fun times.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• 12 Essential Security Tips and Hacks for WordPress – I still haven’t upgrade, weekend project?
• Minimum Viable Product: a guide – Search, Feed and maybe a tad tweak to roles and project M hits MVP.
• Kanban Games – Like the lego game, right now it’s a retro “Under Construction” which looked like it took more time to do that just putting up a wiki. Should be useful ideas for explaining things kanban/agile/lean etc to those not in the know.
• 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide – I’ve heard or seen them all except the “Voronoi” and I had no idea a polar area was called the “Nightingale”.
• Build an Application (Even if it Already Exists) – Definitely agree with the building app part.
• 7 Easy Steps to Get You Started with Goal Setting – I guess it’s that time of year again.
• FireQuery – Firebug extension for jQuery development
• My top 7 RSpec best practices – Nice list.

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.

Contracts out to a couple potential new clients to get signed. Sent out a bunch of invoices and that’s still not the end to all my paperwork. Though it’s the end of the good paperwork. Bills and books and other stuff tomorrow.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• microISV Reading List – Andy Brice put up some books he has read and liked that he thinks might be useful to uISVs. He also posted a similar thread to the Business of Software forums. There are some good books on the list, some I’d disagree with being overly useful and some obvious ones missing. I’m waiting for my comment to be moderated on the thread, I would have pasted it here if I’d have been thinking.
• How to pick a co-founder – If you’re hunting for a partner.
• Writing great documentation:Technical style – I need lots of help here.
• 5 Damn Easy Ways To Improve User Experience – A nice helping of common sense with some examples, it’s always nice to be reminded.
• 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9 – 11. A great sys admin to take care of all this for you, luckily, I think I’ve found one.

Started the first round of discussions with some Virtual Assistants today. Also spent a ridiculous amount of time working on a flyer for a networking meetup this evening. If I already had a VA maybe she could have done it and I could have written more code. Mmmmmm, code. She could probably figure out what to use for my sprint demo tomorrow (webex, goto meeting, etc) and set all that up. Good suggestion for that? 4-8 people, need to see 1 screen with voice chat.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• @jschoolcraft/railsbridge – Had to happen sooner or later, the RailsBridge twitter list of goodness. Lots of interesting projects happening because of some really awesome folks.
• Erin Blaskie – Definitely a new media Virtual Assistant wonder woman. I initially found her from this youtube video. She has a million things going on and they all look awesome. I think she might be a tad out of my league as a VA but damn she speaks geek, uses basecamp, and does all the stuff I don’t want to do.
• RailsCollab – I haven’t look at this in a long time, but I fired it up today and it’s looking pretty good.
• AppTabs – Sounds like a really cool idea but didn’t look nearly as good on my machine.
• FF3.6b2 – Why not, the last one went well
• A FireFox setup – some interesting bits like Multi Links. Once I figure out if I can get Ubiquity to become part of my workflow I’ll post my setup. There were a few doc commands for Ubiquity for Rails and Ruby but they were against the old API, does someone have new ones?
• Securing WordPress – I need to do the .htaccess bit and restrict access to admin from my IP though it looks to have a few consequences.
• MySQL Defaults – and how to tweak them, according to Jeremy Zawodny for high volume sites.
• 6 Tips for Using Google Wave on Your First Project – More tips to try to find a good use case for waves. I mentioned Wave at the meetup tonight, I got a lot of confused stares. Maybe in a couple years it’ll be teh awesome, but for now it’s still ultrageek cutting edge at best.
• Turkey Brining – What? It’s almost Thanksgiving. I love brining my turkeys, Alton Brown was my introduction but this post is even deeper into the details.
• Gifts for Designers – Interesting list of gifts for designer types. Notepod looks interesting, like a really expensive custom Moleskine but neat nonetheless. But Food Face? I think I’m getting that for my girls for Christmas, how can they not eat their dinner on that plate?
• KniQuil – Organic NyQuil, so they say. Mint leaves, agave nectar, green chiles, Southern Comfort and other stuff.

Picked up another client today. He’s been burned by a few freelancers / contract developers and that’s left a bad taste in his mouth. Who can blame him? Unfortunately his story is pretty common based on the leads I’ve talked to.

Interesting tidbits from around the net

• MindMeister – Online, collaborative mind mapping. Pretty nice, and they have a community contributed set of maps you can download.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) – Amazon cloud flavored MySQL.
• 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Site – Disturbing graphic but pretty good set of tips.
• Virtual Appoint – Another option for virtual assistants, US managers and offshore teams, pricing based on how many hours you buy. I’m getting close to needing something like this.
• VMware Fusion 3.0 – Didn’t 2.0 just come out a little while ago? Supports Windows 7. This is my goto virtualization solution on Mac.
• Rails + Google Analytics = easy goal tracking – Interesting trick using flash and a bit of javascript to track information on analytics.