I wonder if watching hours upon hours of children’s programming on television makes adults dumber too.

• 10 Tips on Writing Hero-worthy Error Messages
  Some good reminders here. Error messages need love and care.
• Scrollbar Contents (aka Visual Page Contents)
  An interesting little jQuery plugin that creates a visual area next to the browser scrollbar to denote page contents vs. comments and jump you between each.
• Behind the Typedia Logo Design
  Note that I’m a developer with very minimal design skills, but I came across this behind-the-scenes look at the way a serious craftsman created a very nice looking logo. The rigorous process and focus on the details will be relevant to anyone serious about their particular craft.
• How to Achieve Cross-Browser @font-face Support
  A really excellent tutorial on using custom fonts with @font-face. Seems much less daunting after reading…
• RFPs Will Kill Us All
  Similar to the NO!SPEC movement, some people feel that submitting bids in response to RFPs for technical services is bad mmmkay.
• rack-bug
  Debugging toolbar for Rack applications.

Approximately 1 month until Baby 2.0 ships in my household. Unlike software releases, baby releases tend to ship on time or early. Hopefully our MOM and POP servers are ready to scale.

• Do forms work in HTML emails?
  I’d always wondered about this.
• SORT in Redis
  Grumble grumble, I still haven’t bought into this NOSQL thing, but in case you have…
• The IE CSS Bug Which Cost Me A Month’s Salary
  A cautionary tale. Moral – be sure to test in all browsers.
• Double-Load Guards in Ruby
  If you see warnings about already initialized constants, this article is for you. Good tips to avoid this problem in the future as well.
• Treating User Myopia
  Jeff Atwood highlights a problem with a user not understanding how to use Markdown on one of their forum sites, misses the forest for the trees and blames the user instead of the site’s use of Markdown, and a mob forms in the comments. Ah, Friday.

Agonizing over whether to go desktop (27″ iMac) or laptop (17″ MBP) with my next computer purchase. Not that I have the cash for either at the moment. But if I did…

• jQote – client-side templating
  A nice jQuery-based way to do client side html templates. Thinking about using this for some customizable widgets I wrote.
• 55 Unconventional And Original Free Fonts For An Unique Design
  Some really nice fonts here. Not sure if this is 100% the case, but all of the ones I checked were free for commercial use as well.
• Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5
  Deep Blue Sky does some investigation into browser support for various CSS3 and HTML5 features. Good info.
• Devise
  A full stack Rails authentication engine built on top of Rack-based Warden that uses a strategy provider pattern. Use of Rack allows authentication to be shared across different types of applications (Rails, Sinatra, etc) and strategy pattern allows new, customizable strategies (i.e. Invitable) to be created and shared. Very interesting…
• Part II: We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned.
  I’m enjoying this series. If you are developing a customer-facing software service (or want to someday), you should follow along. Good tips.
• How We Made GitHub Fast
  Lots of red meat here.
• Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC
  More info and GitHub’s data serialization and RPC protocol. BERT and ernie – too funny.

Catching up…

• The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing
  This was my very first thought when I saw the instant typing feature in Google Wave – why would I want the people I’m communicating with to watch me clumsily struggle to type out my thoughts?
• 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS
  All of the styling on these is done with pure CSS – although several use CSS3 techniques that are not fully supported by some, er, lesser browsers. I really dug the rotated effect on #8.
• The Art of Library
  Some general tips & guidelines for writing library code.
• Number to LCD Kata
  Watch Corey Haines tackle the Number to LCD Kata.
• We must ship now and deal with consequences
  Another good take from Uncle Bob Martin on technical debt.
• Three sysadmin mistakes start-ups make
  I’ll admit switching web servers in a crisis, but it solved my problems. So there.

My 82-year old grandmother is on Facebook and regularly writes and responds to status messages and wall posts. My 2.5 year old daughter can navigate my iPhone to find games she wants to play or look at pictures. These are crazy times.

• prawn – 0.5.1
  A new release of Prawn is out. Looks like with the merger of prawn-grid and its advanced CSS 3 support, you have tons of new options for doing grid-based or columnar layouts in your pdfs.
• TweetStream: Ruby Access to the Twitter Streaming API
  Ruby gem for receiving data from twitter via push instead of polling.
• Arial versus Helvetica
  A cool graphic showing the typographic differences on individual letters between Arial and Helvetica.
• rack-chromeframe
  Middleware that injects the necessary code snippets into outgoing html response to use Google Chrome Frame.
• Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters
  “CSS is the weakest link in the web developers toolbox. The problem goes deeper than CSS’s lack of variables. Unlike the “function” in programming, CSS has no fundamental building block.”

I thought cloud computing was supposed to be the silver bullet for scalability. Now everybody wants to move to “real” servers. Me is confused.

• SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers
  Creates a pretty nice looking site map for your website
• Ruby on Rails git pre-commit hook
  A quick look at how to setup hooks to run code (for verifying your tests/specs, updating documentation, etc) when you do a git commit.
• GitHub is Moving to Rackspace!
  GitHub makes the official announcement. Really interesting read of the technical details behind the move.
• Need serial key – CodeSmith Community
  An ignorant user asks for a “crack” serial code for a product IN THE OFFICIAL PRODUCT FORUMS. A company official with a sense of humor responds and geek hilarity ensues.
• 33 Killer Web Icon Sets for Free
  Because I am design-challenged, I’m always looking for good, free icons. Here’s a bunch.

• Railscasts – 7 Security Tips
  New railscast from this week shows common Rails security flaws and how to avoid them. Important.
• 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned
  I wouldn’t call these tricks so much as intermediate CSS techniques that you need to know if you don’t want your designs to look sloppy.
• Create a Funky Parallax Background Effect using jQuery
  Parallax backgrounds are neato, but hard to do right, and certainly can be overdone. This shows how to do it. Use sparingly.
• gsub with a block
  Did you know gsub can take a block? – I knew this (thanks to The Ruby Way), but it’s good to be reminded.
• If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers
  This was making the rounds the last few days. Pretty funny.

Hate it when I think something will only take half an hour and it costs me an evening. And by the way, note to future me, loading javascript and css files dynamically cross browser is HARD.

• Phiculator, the Golden Ratio calculator
  phi, considered the “golden ratio” and often used in architecture, art, etc can be a great way to make your design aesthetically pleasing. This tool helps you calculate the ratio.
• jQuery Tools 1.0.1 released
  A collection of jQuery plugins/tools from the folks that make flowplayer. I’ve used several of these previously and they are top notch. The overlay plugin addition looks really nice.
• Flowplayer 3.1.3 is out
  Speaking of flowplayer, looks like those guys have been busy, and have a new release of it as well. This is my go to flash player these days. Lots of really nice config options.
• SVGWeb Brings SVG Support to Internet Explorer
  Uses flash on IE to replicate and make SVG a viable cross-browser technology.
• Pretty checkboxes with jQuery
  A tutorial showing some pretty spruced up checkboxes.
• New OS, more pane! (Passenger preference pane v1.3)
  New Passenger pref pane for Snow Leopard.

If it’s not clear by now, it should be. The best thing about the Rails/Merb merger is @wycats.

My Five Favorite Things About Rails 3

• Rotate Images and Stuff with CSS only
  “Did you know you can rotate images (and all other html elements) by using nothing but CSS?” Quoting Johnny Carson, “I did not know that. That’s wild, wacky stuff”
• Collecting Feedback on Your Web App
  Good info from the Prefinery folks about what worked and what didn’t as they’ve tried to collect info from beta testers about their service.
• acts_as_commentable_with_threading
  A drop-in replacement for acts_as_commentable that adds threading features.
• acts_as_scribe
  I know, another “acts_as_…” plugin. This one allows you to track user activity (for a timeline, wall, etc).
• 20 Top jQuery tips & tricks for jQuery programmers
  Useful stuff.
• 5 Ways to Make Ajax Calls with jQuery
  I know I get confused about the different ways to make AJAX calls with jQuery. This clears things up.

I think we actually do need a “death panel.” For IE6 that is…

• ruby_koans
  An awesome idea! Learn Ruby by making the tests pass for short “koans” that build up your knowledge and build upon each other.
• The Brads – Alignment in Design
  Great cartoon illustration about using alignments in web design.
• punypng: crushing your images even more
  A better way to crush your pngs (and jpegs?)
• test-first-teaching
  Homework assignments for teaching ruby.
• clickistrano
  A one-click deployment app for Capistrano deployments. Built with Sinatra.
• AnythingSlider jQuery Plugin
  Another jQuery slider plugin, but this one is ‘really “fully featured”.’ I’ve always used the jQuery scrollable plugin from the flowplayer folks, but might be worth looking at another option.
• Telescopic Text
  Just for fun. Click on the highlighted text and watch a simple statement about making tea become a very complex narrative. Brilliantly executed.