http://philcrissman.com Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:43:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I almost did not notice that I have been tagged with a meme by mrBen from jedimoose.org. Directives may be separated with a space. From Ruby in a Nutshell, by Matz, which just happens to be on top of the books on my desk. There are only actually two complete sentences on the ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/11/13/a-meme In lieu of posting anything of substance, I have noticed that the percentage of this blog's content consisting of Finnish heavy metal with accordions is alarmingly low. Thus, Found via Squeezyboy, which search was in turn prompted by peeja mentioning he was going to get an accordion. http://philcrissman.com/2008/11/06/excuse-me-but-you-got-your-polka-in-my-heavy-metal Making small changes to an existing website presents its own unique challenges, as ideally you'd like to change only what is absolutely necessary. When the previous builders have used their own CMS, and Javascript which was automatically generated by a Macromedia/Adobe product (oh, yes), not to mention a little flash ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/10/20/when-javascript-and-flash-arent-playing-well-together I'm in the process of working my way through the "Rails Routing From the Inside Out" guide at RailsGuts.com. I'm not all the way through the document, yet, but so far it looks like the best such document I've seen, short of reading the code yourself with someone holding your ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/10/12/railsguts-blank Well, Jason Calcanis has written something about startups and the economy. One of his suggestions is that if your company doesn't currently have a revenue stream, it needs to get one, like yesterday. Or at least by Monday. I propose a Rails plugin, which we will call acts_as_monetized. It will automatically track ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/10/02/acts_as_monetized Say you have an array. Maybe it is ["Larry", "Moe", "Curly"]. You'd like to display this as a sentence, not just a join, so it would read "Larry, Moe and Curly". That would be nice. Of course, you can't guarantee that your array will have three items. Maybe tomorrow it ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/10/02/ruby-tidbits-sentencizing-a-list-of-things I've finally got around to putting Redtip, a Rails plugin I've been working on, up onto github. It can be found here; I also have a minimal project page (for now) here. Redtip is mainly a few helper methods and a lot of JavaScript that gives you some tooltip-like popouts to ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/09/30/redtip-rails-plugin It would be very easy. They could release an update to IE which consisted of a script which removed IE and downloaded Firefox 3, accompanied with an apology for IE ever having existed. I'm just saying. I'd respect them more if they did it, for one. http://philcrissman.com/2008/09/23/what-microsoft-could-do-to-improve-their-image I really like haml. Haml is just a markup language that avoids a lot of the repetition and extra cruft which xml-based markup requires. It's so easy to install and use that writing Yet Another Short Haml Tutorial would be a colossal waste of time. Just visit the above link and you'll ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/09/20/the-haml-of-the-gods I can remember, once, long ago, being entranced with the idea of writing programs whose output was identical to its own code. This is, of course, entirely impractical and not really good for anything. Ruby has a built-in variable, $0, which refers to the name of ruby program currently being ... http://philcrissman.com/2008/09/06/stupid-ruby-tricks