Todd Huss

Working at GreatSchools we do a lot of CSS work and we have a number of CSS books on our library shelf. However, last month we picked up a copy of Transcending CSS and it’s far and away the most enlightening book on CSS I’ve read. We’re already changing the way we do our CSS for the better as a result.

Having worked with a lot of front-end Read the rest of this entry »

Update 6/14/2007: Dion Almaer has published a nice Javascript helper which makes working with spreadsheets much nicer, I’ve moved my stuff to it and it’s a big improvement over using the Google JSON api directly.

Publishing dynamic content on your website in a format that you can style with CSS has gotten a whole lot easier with Google’s simple JSON based Javascript API’s. The two I’ve found myself playing with lately are the Google Ajax Feed API for publishing RSS and Atom feeds and the Google Spreadsheet API
for publishing little snippets of text that should be easily editable.

Say you want a simple headline on your homepage that you can change daily. Here’s how you’d do it with the Google Spreadsheet API:

1. Create a spreadsheet making the first row the column headers (important because you’ll refer to the cell by the column header):

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Hello lazy web, I’m looking for some advice on caching proxy servers and thought you might have some good pointers!

We currently front our site with 3 caching proxy servers to offload static content from the web servers and we haven’t found the right solution yet. We’ve tried a number of solutions including Oops and Apache with mod_cache (which we’re currently running) but they are either missing a critical feature, have buggy caching behavior, or crash under heavy load. The main features I’m looking for are:
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I’m thrilled that GreatSchools has won the Webby People’s Voice Award for best Family/Parenting site. We’ve been in the nominations before but I think continued growth and brand awareness through a largely redesigned site helped push us over the top this year.
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Back at the end of 2005 I wrote a short post titled Cloaking, no need to be ashamed and now in 2007 even more big sites are practicing some form of search engine crawler targeted cloaking. Yet still most SEO’s will give you a blanket answer and tell you to avoid cloaking so you don’t get delisted. I take a more pragmatic view and experience has taught me that certain forms of cloaking can be good!
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My good friends in the east bay have just debuted their new Ruby on Rails based site Bandega :: never miss a show again! If you’re a San Francisco Bay Area resident that loves indie rock and wants to keep track of your favorite bands swing by Bandega and check them out!

Update 2/5/07: I’ve since discovered five plugins that address this very problem with slightly different approaches (the latter two store a permalink in the table, good for mutable titles):

• acts_as_sluggable
• acts_as_urlnameable
• acts_as_slugable
• acts_as_friendly_param
• permalink_fu

Obie’s recent post on search engine friendly URL’s in Ruby on Rails 1.2 and greater couldn’t have been more timely. I was about to tackle search engine friendly URL’s on my little local san francisco bay area boating classifieds site and after reading his blog post, 15 minutes later it was done. Here’s the old URL structure:
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Update 2/11/07: Just to clarify, this plugin won’t keep your Rails site running on Dreamhost if the sum of all your running processes exceeds 200MB (which is when their process monitor kills your processes). Run ps aux and sum the VSZ column and then divide by 1024. If you’re pushing the limit and are only running one Rails site you may want to look at another provider. If you’re running multiple Rails sites, run each site under a different user (one account can create many users).

Per Thomas Aylott’s suggestion on my previous post Keeping Rails Running at Dreamhost Part 2 I’ve decided to release my Dreamhost signal handling code as a Rails plugin. I’m using it on a Rails 1.2.1 site and a Rails 1.1.6 site.
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Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin.
Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make sure you make it executable!

My first attempt to keep my Ruby on Rails sites running at Dreamhost involved modifying dispatch.fcgi to implement the frao_handler approach as described on the wiki. This left me with a 3% 500 error rate. Ughh!
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Update 1/25/07: Francois pointed out that now as of Piston 1.3.0 you can now do this all with the following command:

piston switch http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-2-1 vendor/rails

For starters, if you’re still using svn:externals to manage your vendor/rails directory it’s time to switch to using Piston. svn:externals is so Q4!
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