Topics in ‘happy fun notes’

Chattering at Canada on Rails

Somehow I forgot to mention that I will be at Canada on Rails this April 13th through 14th. D’oh. How it could slip my mind, I can’t fathom… I blame the drugs! I’m giving an introductory talk on Ajax in Ruby on Rails, and I hope to see you there. Even if my topic’s not […]

How Not to do Customer Service

If you’re like me, you’ve bought into the whole “t-shirts are the new bumperstickers” thing. For one, I can spend $15 on a t-shirt and not have to worry about breaking out the acetone and blowdrier later if I change my mind. There’s no risk to my paint job, and I don’t have that low-level […]

Cool Stuff Round-up

Just to balance off the intense Amy-centricism of the previous post, I’d like to have a little linkapalooza of cool stuff from other people which you’ll want to check out. Faster TDD with Rails promises, well, faster TDD with Rails. Florian’s new approach eliminates a lot of the cruft when running tests on Rails apps […]

Podcast & Book

This post is all about the shameless self-promotion, so be warned! Podcast Yesterday I had the honor of being podcast-interviewed by Geoffrey Grosenbach of TopFunky and Ruby on Rails Podcast fame. You can download it, as well as other recent podcasty goodness, here (temporary URL… they’re waiting on DNS changes to go through). It’s nearly […]

web|works content, part 2

OK, I lied. Turns out the upstream here on the hotel wireless is actually very good, so here we are, well before evening: Quicktime Movie (Large – 640×480) 5.2mb Quicktime Movie (Small – 320×240 2.1mb PDF 5.9mb Quicktime movie usage: Download the file to disk, please, don’t try to run it in your web browser—not […]

web|works content, part 1

Well, I haven’t decided the best way to export my slideshow yet since my pretty diagrams and such somehow resulted in a 40 meg Flash file. Wow. But what I will probably do is one PDF export and a couple of different Quicktime types. So, stay tuned to this location… I’ll post it tonight. In […]

web|works: almost there!

It’s 9:29am and I’m sitting in Rasmus Lerdorf’s keynote in Toronto, and I just finally wrapped up adding a couple new illustrations to my presentation for my first talk, which is supposed to be in 15 minutes. (But everything appears to be running a bit late.) Flying by the seat of my pants? Nahhhh. A […]

pros & cons — tech cons, that is

Well, I’ll be in Toronto next week, speaking about Ajax and UI-for-dum–err, I mean, UI-for-developers at php|works. If you’re around, you should come. Get yer employers to pay for it. And then, come mid-October, I’ll be out at RubyConf. To that end, I set up the RubyConf Social Wiki for hooking up with ride shares, […]

Yet more Ajax debugging

neillzero on #rubyonrails pointed us at this Greasemonkey script (blog post about it) which is even more appropriate for debugging Ajax stuff than the other techniques I’ve mentioned here. In addition to showing you the requests, it even lets you modify requests. As the author says: Each individual XMLHttpRequest invocation will get listed there, with […]

Having your stylesheets neatly organized

A helpful #rubyonrails denizen named Dema posted an entry to his blog today and asked if his Rails solution was useful to anybody. Boy is it ever! Here’s what he has to say: At first, you start with a global CSS file, included in every page thru the ‘link’ tag. But as your website grows […]

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