Links for 9-19-10
node.js lib that creates a streaming connection with twitter and pushes any incoming statuses to a tweet event
Become a provider today and make your cloud service available to tens of thousands of Heroku developers to activate with one-click.
Ruby on Rails Guides: Debugging Rails Applications
This guide introduces techniques for debugging Ruby on Rails applications.
Using the Ruby debugger with Rails will save you oodles of time.
In controllers, do not call to_json directly, allow render to do that for you. If you need to tweak the JSON output, override as_json in your model, or call as_json directly.
If you treat finishing like a skill, rather than simply a step in the process, you can acknowledge not only that it’s something you can get better at, but also what habits and thought processes get in your way.
ThoughtWorksStudios's oauth2_provider
A Rails plugin to OAuth v2.0 enable your rails application
Making Posterous faster with Varnish
...our tests have shown that pages served out of Varnish see a ~67% speed improvement in total page load time.
Process links in text!
Modernizr adds classes to the element which allow you to target specific browser functionality in your stylesheet. You don't actually need to write any Javascript to use it.
A while back, we announced to our journalists that we shut NewsTilt down, only two months since we launched. I think people are interested in why it failed, and there are some interesting lessons in our demise, at least for me.
Using Varnish So News Doesn't Break Your Server - NYTimes.com
Three months earlier, I would have been swearing profusely at this point, trying to spin up new servers in time to avoid watching all my application servers groan and die. But that day I watched as all of the application servers remained unperturbed. The difference? Varnish.
7 Wordpress Themes for Launching your Minimum Viable Product
In creation of such rapid prototypes, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) idea is key. Neverthless, open source platforms such as WordPress is key enabler to the Lean Startup. This was the idea back when I shared 9 Minimum Viable Product WordPress Themes. The post turned out to receive pretty good interest among aspiring enterpreneurs. So I decided to share some more recent WordPress themes that can help in launching your lean SaaS or App product.
10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies
This article discusses usability findings of research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys pertaining to website usability and improvements.
Realtime client push powered by HTML5 websockets
I present to you a manifesto of done.
Why It's So Darn Hard To Hire A Decent Engineer
Unemployment in the United States is still at a brutal 9.6%, but for software engineers the job market couldn't look much better.
RESTful email for Rails
Realtime server push with node.js, WebSockets and Comet
Receiving Incoming Email in Rails 3
Here I will cover some of the basic options for receiving email with some of the advantages and disadvantages.
Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup
Of course, maintaing one’s health is far from a waste, but for geeks, time not spent working or learning usually feels squandered. Taking in a brainy podcast at the gym combats that feeling.
Real-time feed parsing in the cloud for web-developers
It’s no surprise that iPhone developers are short on supply and high on demand, and naturally this means it’s going to cost quite a bit to develop an app.
Step one would be “Attract a large number of potential users”. Without doubt the best way to do this is with good content. Content precedes design.
A tool for uploading files using Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 or Browserplus
RSoC status: Namespacing engines
The next thing that needed to be done to allow mounting engines easily is namespacing. Namespacing is crucial to avoid conflicts between engines and application itself.
This commit merges most of the work done by Piotr Sarnacki in his Ruby Summer of Code project. His work brings several capabilities from app to engines, as routes, middleware stack, asset handling and much more. Please check Rails::Engine documentation for more references.
An on-the-fly processing/encoding framework written as a Rack application.
High performance memcached client for Ruby
An iPhone app developer’s diary, and some thoughts on Android
So, for those interested, here’s my tale of how the Lab iPhone app came into being — a tale I hope lots more news organizations can tell. Because if I can do it for a total cost of $624, there’s no reason more newspapers shouldn’t be on the platform.
Allowing devise login with facebook account
When using devise and oauth, devise creates a "/users/oauth/facebook/callback" in your application to get the response from facebook, we just need to create a find_for_facebook_oauth in the User model.
Last week I asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend a good application to help me track the billable time I’m spending on various client projects.
Cloudant's BigCouch is open-source
Think of BigCouch as a set of Erlang/OTP applications that allow you to create a cluster of CouchDBs that is distributed across many nodes/servers. Instead of one big honking CouchDB, the result is an elastic data store which is fully CouchDB API-compliant.
Riding Rails: Rails 3.0: It's ready!
Rails 3.0 has been underway for a good two years, so it’s with immense pleasure that we can declare it’s finally here. We’ve brought the work of more than 1,600 contributors together to make everything better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful.
Part 4: Security’n stuff: Users, Authentication, Authorisation and Permissions
Backblaze online backup almost acquired
In this post, I’ll share why I am publicly sharing this, exactly what happened, the details of our acquisition process, how we are moving forward, and what we learned.