Auto-upgrade feature of WordPress is nice when it works. Had to do a lot of chmod 777 to make it happen.

• jquery week-calendar
  A very nice looking jquery calendar plugin.
• freemium
  Subscription management and processing Rails plugin for SaaS / recurring billing. Looks like it only supports a couple of gateways at the moment.
• A Closer Look: The Font Sizing Choice
  Bottom line – if you still need to support IE6 (and you can actually figure out the crazy math), use em. Otherwise, it should be safe these days to use px.
• New Screencast: Think Geek Background Fade Technique
  An interesting background fade technique using css.
• comma_pile
  A Ruby gem for processing and aggregating CSV files.

• pivotpro
  A gem to automate interaction with Cucumber and PivotalTracker.
• slickgrid – jQuery grid/spreadsheet
  A JavaScript grid/spreadsheet component that focuses on being high-performance and on grid features over data manipulation (that the author feels is best left to the developer). Does indeed look slick.
• CSS Dock Menu using JQuery
  Nice example of a Mac-style dock using JQuery + a Fisheye Interface component.
• Wrap text in Ruby
  A snippet that uses regular expressions to wrap text.
• ColorSuckr
  Extracts color from photos to create color schemes. Great for matching colors to background images.

• What’s New in Edge Rails: Independent Model Validators
  Now you can use Validator classes to decouple complex validation logic from your models. Very nice.
• stories
  Not new, but new to me. Stories auto-generates Cucumber-style human readable acceptance test output, without all the extra Cucumber hassle. Since I don’t have customers that read my acceptance tests, I’ve never gotten down with Cucumber, but this might make it into my workflow.
• Which Tweets Matter ?
  Mark Cuban discusses new features for icerocket’s twitter search, including reply/retweet and viewing the person’s follower count.
• deadweight
  Really cool gem for finding & eliminating unused CSS selectors.
• Pretty output of rails errors when doing AJAX with jQuery
  jnunemaker dropped this little goodie on gist for us.
• Practicing product minimalism
  On my first day of work at Microsoft as a PM six years ago, I sat down with my first manager for our first one-on-one and at the end she asked, Are there any questions? I said yes — one last one: “When do we decide to remove features?”

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.

Oh hai Friday! Thank God ur here! (If I’m resorting to lolcats you know that’s a sign of a long week)

• Text Rotation with CSS
  An alternative css trick to the Date Display with Sprites technique that I posted a link to a few days ago. This one rotates text using pure css – no images required.
• How To Develop a jQuery Plugin
  A nice tutorial for getting started making your own plugins.
• Working With Multiple Ruby Versions Has Never Been This Easy
  They’ve created a ruby switcher that can install and switch between various flavors of ruby. Switching can be done per terminal shell. Looks incredibly useful.
• ViewLikeUs – Check Sites in Various Resolutions!
  An AJAX powered site that allows you to test how your website will look with various browser resolutions. OSIM

About to do the whole undress to get through security at the airport thing. Not sure why I even bothered to get fully dressed this morning.

• Date Display Technique with Sprites
  Cool css trick that might be useful elsewhere as well.
• Chroma-Hash
  An interesting experiment (using jQuery) to create secure visual feedback for password fields.
• Getting Started with Orbited
  An introductory tutorial to Comet and Orbited
• Supporting IE6 – a poison chalice or the holy grail? | Building the real-time web
  A different take on the, er, advantages, to supporting this awful browser.

How did I survive three decades without coffee?

• Load Impact – Free web site load test
  A service for load testing your website. Starts at the great price of free for “low load level” testing (whatever that means) up to $99 for advanced level testing (5000 users).
• Can’t Get Approval for your App? Sell the Source Code
  Interesting way to make lemonade from lemons. Probably not a significant market here, but who knows.
• Plugin Review: WordPress Console
  Review of a very irb-like WordPress Console plugin for working with php + WordPress. Thumbs way up!
• Better Password Inputs, iPhone Style
  Use jquery + css to display password inputs iPhone-style.
• announcement_fu
  A Rails plugin for site-wide announcements. Currently in “pre-beta,” but something I’m keeping an eye on.

I would support a political platform that proposed making meetings illegal on Fridays. You? Who’s with me?

• HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using – Nettuts+
  A good introductory tutorial for getting a taste of what your markup/styling will look like in the brave new world of HTML 5. Key takeaway – alot less divs (in favor of more semantic-sounding tags like header, section, article, etc) and alot of really cool styling techniques that are (typically) only supported in a few (read: non-Microsoft) browsers.
• Top iPhone App Developer Was Losing Out On $2000 A Day Because Of Sloppy Coding
  Yikes! A good reminder to check your production config for proper api keys, connection info, etc…
• hpoom – TweetPeep
  A jquery plugin that allows you to create a wallpapered area of your page with twitter profile images of people discussing a particular topic. Think fixoutlook.org. Very very cool.
• The Journey to Ruby 1.9
  Some help navigating the gotchas from the folks at thoughtbot.