After listening to this weeks Ruby on Rails podcast where Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed Bruce Tate, it got me to thinking about why Ruby on Rails appeals to me. For me as a Java person, the real appeal of Ruby lies in Rails and here’s why: (more…)
Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
5 things Ruby on Rails has that Java doesn’t
Monday, March 13th, 2006Enhancements to subModal
Friday, March 10th, 2006I started hacking around with subModal (modal javascript windows with background shading) this morning to add some features I liked in Lightbox Gone Wild. You can try it out and download my changes to subModal here. They are (more…)
Hiring a web front-end engineer and a rant
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006Update 3/28/06: Still looking… not for a web designer but a web front-end engineer. Jemery does a good job of describing the distrinction. No doubt about it, this is a hot skill set that is extremely hard to find!
I’m hiring a front-end web developer (contract or FTE) for either on-site or remote work. This is not a web designer or graphics designer job but rather a technical front-end developer, someone with crazy XHTML/CSS/Javascript skills (more…)
Modal windows with Javascript and CSS
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006One of the side projects I spent a little time on today was researching the use of on-page modal dialog boxes using Javascript and CSS that shade or darken the rest of the page while they are open. It looks like it will be an easy job thanks to these two solutions that are made freely available: (more…)
Foxmarks Firefox bookmark synchronization
Thursday, February 23rd, 2006I use a slew of machines so keeping my bookmarks and files synchronized between them has always been a priority. I’ve had the file synchronization issue under control for a while now by putting my documents and such into subversion but only twice (more…)
Captcha, or is it capfcha, no maybe it’s Gopfcho, dammit!
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006You’re trying to post a comment on a blog or sign-up for an online service and you have to respond to a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to authenticate that you are indeed a real person. You look at it and you start pondering if it’s a one or an l, a zero or an o (more…)
Deconstructing Earl and Yuri
Sunday, February 19th, 2006Let’s start with the difference between URL, URI, and URN because there is a lot of confusion around these terms, and rightfully so. The W3C had to issue a recommendation after URI and URL started being used interchangeably in RFC’s.
- URI: This is the umbrella or super-set that contains URLs and URNs. URN and URL are URI sub-types. Some mistakenly believe that a URI is a URL without request parameters and based on the getRequestURI method in the servlet API it’s easy to see why.
- URL: a URI that specifies the network location of a resource such as http, mailto, and ftp.
- URN: a URI that specifies a namespace and an identifier. For example an ISBN number such as urn:isbn:n-nn-nnnnnn-n is a unique identifier but it doesn’t tell you where to fetch the resource.
According to the W3C we shouldn’t use the term URL anymore (more…)
Spellchecking belongs in the browser, not on the website
Friday, February 17th, 2006With all of the different sites, forums, blogs, etc… that use textareas for writing on the web, it’s unrealistic to expect them all to have a good spellchecker. Even sites that do have spellcheckers have very different levels of quality. I finally had the common sense to install a browser based spellchecker more recently and what a difference!
Spellchecking doesn’t belong on websites because it requires significant personalization to work well depending on the authors areas of interest or expertise. For example, I want to tell my spellchecker to ignore springmvc, webwork, mysql, postgres, etc… Given most people don’t run browser based spellcheckers at the moment it’s still a good idea (more…)
The top 5 most common XHTML mistakes
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006When I first started writing XHTML pages about a year ago I thought that all there was to it was closing every tag XML style. Oh how wrong I was! I’ve since learned to W3C validate as I go so I don’t dig myself into too much of a hole. If you want to see some really nicely written XHTML (more…)
Nofollow hurts bloggers more than spammers
Friday, February 3rd, 2006Nofollow really took off in the blogging community as a means to stop comment spammers and I think at this point it’s safe to say that it’s had absolutely no effect on that front. What’s worse is that it’s the wrong approach to prevent spam as it punishes readers who leave insightful comments or trackbacks by withholding the link value they get in exchange for participating. If someone is willing to take the time to leave a comment we should be more than happy to give them the link value. The only thing nofollow does effectively is hurt the pagerank of active blog participants which was never the desired effect! For comment spam we need to stick with less draconian approaches like Akismet and Captcha.
