• RubyTrends
  A good place to find popular Ruby projects and/or resources. Particularly helpful for those starting out and looking for good Ruby or Rails books.
• A Git Workflow for Agile Teams
  I’m always intrigued by the development workflows that others use. Not to mention, posts like this were invaluable to me when I was learning Git.
• Easy Google Maps with jQuery
  A nice little ditty for displaying a google map with jQuery.
• Speeding up Google Analytics load times with a jQuery plugin
  Another jQuery plugin for using Google Analytics.
• Fail Whale Pillow
  Nice. Just nice.

Wondering if my intro comments on these posts are starting to sound like garfield minus garfield.

• In-Field Labels: A Better Way + jQuery Plugin
  A nice jQuery plugin for implementing in-field labels that don’t completely disappear when the field receives focus (which is, um, helpful if you need to autofocus a particular field and you still want the user to know what the field is for)
• Build, Design, Launch an App in <40 Man Hours
  How Less Everything launched new app Less Cabin Fever in under 40 hours. Of course they started with an existing code base (http://lovdbyless.com), but still…
• wkhtmltopdf
  Convert html to pdf using webkit.
• The Rails State Machine
  Rails edge recently added built-in state machine functionality. Here’s a few examples of how you might take advantage of this feature.
• Why you don’t want to shard
  More of a “don’t” than a “why”, which basically comes down to the fact that it makes both development and continuing operations very complicated, mmkay.
• Observational: Better Observers for ActiveRecord
  Shift the responsibility of common callback functionality (like sending a welcome email to a user) out of the model where it doesn’t make sense.

Lots of good links on the internets today…

• Rails in the Enterprise
  Some anecdotal success stories and stats from the less everything guys (and other folks in the comments) doing Rails work in the enterprise trenches.
• Dear User of My Open Source Project
  A rant against the entitlement mindset of some open source software users. As usual, interesting dialogue in the comments.
• memcached gem release
  Now bundles in libmemcached, making it much easier to install and get going.
• Ruby Best Practices – Should I Tap that Hash? (Ruby 1.9 Style)
  An interesting use of Ruby 1.9′s tap method. I’m not sure I like it as it isn’t all that intuitive.
• Ruby I don’t like #2 – catch(:wtf) { throw :wtf }
  I don’t like the example used in this case (I don’t think it’s a typical usage of throw/catch), and I don’t think throw/catch is inherently bad. But I guess that’s why it’s not titled “Ruby that Robin doesn’t like.” Everybody has their own opinions.
• Deployment Script Spring Cleaning
  How GitHub deploy went from 15m to 14s. Picked up some good capistrano/deployment insights here that I may apply to some of my own deployment scripts.
• 10 Tips for Writing Better jQuery Code
  A few here that I hadn’t seen before.

Toddler’s brain decides that 4:30am is a good time to get up for the day. My brain, in retrospect, does not concur.

• Ruby I don’t like #1 – Explicit ‘return’
  Interesting discussion going on in the comments section. Personally, I don’t like unnecessary explicit returns scattered throughout a method, but I do like to use guard clauses over multi-conditionals.
• AnythingZoomer jQuery Plugin
  Allows mouseover zooming of text, etc.
• Programmatically Creating Website Thumbnails : Accidental Technologist
  I’ve used websnapr before with mixed results. Haven’t investigated any of the others mentioned.
• Bowline – A Ruby GUI framework
  Cross-platform desktop development framework that sits on top of Titanium/Webkit. Early stage, but interesting.
• Worst case scenario
  Adam Milligan goes on the offensive to lobby for his Rails patch to fix a problem with functional tests possibly masking problems with incorrect parameter types.

Had to increase my default console font-size this weekend. Pretty sure this is an early sign of programmer old-age.

• wycats’s textmate
  A new release of this command-line package manager for TextMate.
• Rails Freelancing Handbook
  A new ebook from Mike Gunderloy. Will be buying this one as well as his Rails Rescue Handbook. Mike’s work is always top notch.
• Recurring Items in a Rails Application
  Speaking of Mike, he’s published an approach to handling the scheduling of recurring items.
• Advanced Command Line
  A new peepcode screencast released over the weekend. Full of great info to get the most out of your bash (or zsh) shell – especially helpful for this relatively newbie *nix guy.
• compass-colors
  Color tools and Theme support for Compass & SASS. You provide base color and you can get themes like Monochromatic, Complementary, Triadic, etc.