To Read Later, or, clearing out a few browser tabs
WTF? I remember a bug we had in an app we built that used Tantek's box model hack and an empty stylesheet; IE would kick off an error when the stylesheet failed to load (actually, it was just empty - we had to put a comment in to make IE ignore that it was empty of selectors) that would recall a script that would delete what the user had just entered into the app. That sucked, and, what's worse, was impossible to recreate without that specific browser version. I can relate to this guy's pain.
DHH is pointing out flaws in publishing business models and coming up with a few alternatives. This is going to be the next big thing, methinks - the smaller tech publishers are waking up to it, too. I stopped even trying to write books because I made so much more per hour as an editor (technical or development) or writing articles than I ever made writing books.
Here's a rundown of the recent MIT spam conference. I've been fighting spam for the past several years, having decided that Web standards were not as important as saving email from itself and from the criminals who abuse it. My other blog and project site may be of interest to you if you're running sendmail and dealing with spam, too.
Time to dig into more Ajaxy love. JSON, http://script.aculo.us/, COMET, site design using Prototype.
Also, I've been doing some RoR development lately, so here are a few links to useful info about the latest release of RoR.
- Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on rocket fuel
- Rails 1.1: RJS, Active Record++, respond_to, integration tests, and 500 other things!
And this article comparing ten different PHP Model-View-Controller frameworks may be of interest. We're doing an overhaul of our internal design and development practices, and the MVC stuff is as close as anything I've found to the way I think about Web software development. And RoR is a very clean implementation. (And given what a pain in the ass Tomcat setup is, I'm liking it more and more).
Making Tomcat and RedHat ES4 play nice together sucks, but this article helped.
FInally, we've been using Basecamp for some months here, so it's nice to see they finally got an API. I also need to look into their collaborative writing app.
Anyway, I'm blogging again. If nothing else, I'll be using this space to clear out the old browser tabs from time to time, and as a record of what I'm doing, thinking, and feeling. Give me a few days to reskin this silly default MT template, though.