Commentary
Weekend Links
Jan 31st
The usual round of Rails 3 updates: Pratik writes about the new Active Record Query Interface. I’ve had trouble with chaining nested scopes, so am very glad to see a better logic implementation, but the real win is that no queries are executed until the results are needed meaning that fragment caching suddenly gets much easier/more reasonable to use. Also on the new API front, Mikel has a piece on the new ActionMailer API which also seems much improved. Naturally with so many pieces about Rails 3 cropping up, posts are emerging linking as many as possible; Maxim Chernyak’s is the most comprehensive I’ve seen so far (though it’s missing my posts on the topic). If you’ve got a few hours free on February 18th, you may like to check out O’Reilly’s free online conference about Rails 3. And if you can’t wait to get started you might like to look at Jeremy McNally’s rails-upgrade gem that may help you on your way.
Caliper is a hosted version of the metric_fu gem, providing a very simple way to get lots of stats about your ruby app. I’ve had trouble getting metric_fu to run cleanly, so this could be a handy tool, though I’d rather get metric_fu properly integrated into my own Continuous Integration system. Speaking of which, my office mate Matt wrote up his experiences setting up Hudson for CI. I’m using Hudson too (partly thanks to Matt’s recommendations) and would highly recommend it.
I enjoyed reading about Tim Bray’s experience teaching his son and his classmates about blogging. Tim’s approach of having the students start by writing seems a great way to instil a positive vision of the web and also introduce a sense that web content isn’t necessarily to be trusted. On an entirely different note, I also enjoyed Russell’s brief piece “lowering the point point” arguing that:
Playing with something like Gowalla or Foursquare is worth doing – to see if it’s worth doing.
It’s been good to see Rachel Andrew blogging more frequently of late and I’m enjoying her pieces about running a small business. I’m particularly intrigued to see what responses come in to her piece about responding to tenders/RFPs as that’s a topic I’ve been wondering about lately too.
Google Sites suddenly becomes more interesting thanks to the addition of a Data API. On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve been watching Tom release extractomatic and Paul release docent with some interest. It used to be that the potential ongoing work of maintenance was a disincentive to releasing tools that others might use, but things like Google App Engine and heroku really help with that.
Oh yes, Google are phasing out support for IE6. Could this be the move that pushes those last hold-out large institutions to upgrade to browsers created less than eight years ago?
NPR Backstory: Using twitter to contextualise news
Jun 20th
I really liked this story about the NPRbackstory twitter account. The panel at SxSW about newspaper APIs (which NPR was tagged onto) was one of the highlights, filled with promise, and it’s good to hear about a tangible (albeit experimental) use of one of those APIs to begin to contextualise breaking news.
All too often we lack the memory or the back-knowledge to appropriately interpret the stories that dominate the news (I was a little surprised and disappointed that the BBC stories about Khamnei’s comments on Britain didn’t note that “blame the British” is a common off-hand comment in Iran). News organisations often have vast resources that could help us develop some of that back-knowledge but they’re under-utilised. It’s rarely helpfully presented by web-based news outlets, but for a radio station it’s particularly hard to get that out. Twitter provides a nice way of passing on some tidbits and it’s great that NPR are using it for more than driving traffic to their very latest content.
Selected Saturday links
Feb 21st
It’s always a little embarassing to realise that two or more consecutive blog postings are nothing more than a collection of links, but that’s the way it is at the moment. Busy-ness, illness and distractedness have all kept me from the blog this week. There aren’t any clear themes in this week’s links either. Chatter around OAuth has continued apace, as have musings about fuzziness, location, time, and the web (represented well by Matt Jones’ piece), but mostly this is the (to be) usual random assortment that have spent more than a few seconds open in my newsreader or web browser
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twitteroauth – PHP OAuth lib for Twitter
Further evidence that OAuth support for twitter is finally on its way in the form of a PHP library for interfacing with it.
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Fixing OAuth
The author of my favourite iPhone twitter client (tweetie) outlines an idea for improving the usability of OAuth outside of web applications.
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iPhoneFlow – iPhone Development Links
iPhoneFlow is a community link blog for iPhone developers. (via Mobile Orchard)
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Interview with Matt Bauer, author of Data Processing and Visualization with Ruby
I’m really looking forward to this book.
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CloudMade: Using OpenStreetMap to Chart the Future of Mapping
CloudMade is a new mapping service from some of the creators of Open Street Map. Lots of libraries for integration are available, along with a variety of services on top of the map data.
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seed16 a new model for conferences
An interesting response to the ridiculous speed with which tickets for the next BarCamp London sold out, and the issues that that raises.
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A new kind of front page
How Phil Gyford is currently experimenting with the front page of his site, pulling together his activities from across the web. I really like the way Phil approaches these sorts of projects and manages to pull things together in interesting ways.
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Implementing Prototype’s Array Methods in jQuery
One less reason to use Prototype over jQuery if you’ve not already made the switch. Like Josh I find I rarely feel the absence of the array methods Prototype provides when I write javascript with jQuery, but there are some convenient shortcuts here.
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Exporting the past into the future, or, “The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present”
A series of musings from Matt Jones on space, time and the web (in its biggest sense), “nowish”, “hereish” and all that. Also notable for having what may be the longest ’slug’ URL component of any article I’ve linked to from this blog.
Selected Saturday Links
Feb 7th
Selected links that seem to deserve a bit more traction and longevity than a simple mention on twitter. Big themes this week were the release of Rails 2.3 RC 1 (which I explored through my work on the theme_support plugin and Clay Shirky’s series of talks in London. theme_support aside, I’ve mostly been focussed on some to-be-revealed developments to Generous and release an early version of the new Street Action site (DNS will hopefully propagate on that soon).
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Interaction Design Pilot Year (Courses) » ToyView » Overview
“In this class, students created innovative ‘magical’ concepts, that are physical, serving as controllers and actuators for functions dealing with digital data. Digital data can be a wide set of elements, starting from pure text and ending in audio, videos, images, and at times even social particles. The emphasis was on creating a new hybrid of physical computer games.” – via @moleitau
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PSFK’s Good Ideas Salon: What are the hot ideas in mobile?
Matt Jones: “We should be an embodied person in the world rather than a disembodied finger tickling a screen walking down the street. We need to unfold and unpack the screen into the world.” Lovely.
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A Plugin Development Pattern » Learning jQuery
Some nice tips to bear in mind when building jQuery plugins.
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Mashing up planning data with Google Maps
Some local government departments are using the PlanningAlerts.com service to populate their own websites! I’ve no idea if the scrapers I wrote a year or so ago for PlanningAlerts got any usage, but it’s good to see the site getting some use regardless. Just a shame the councils don’t have the data exposed cleanly even for their own internal use!
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Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes
They’ve packed a lot into quite a short release cycle
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Ryan’s Scraps: What’s New in Edge Rails: Nested Object Forms
Another write up of the nested object forms functionality in Rails 2.3. Very nice to see a standardised solution to this, since almost every project seems to tackle it at some point
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Engines in Rails 2.3
Some support for “Rails Engines”, plugins that look a bit like mini-apps, has been built into Rails 2.3 James Adam’s write up shows how this compares with his Engines plugin.
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Fraser Speirs – On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09
Good write up, from an entirely biased but very thoughtful source. It sounds like Apple built Facebook integration into iPhoto and then tacked flickr on without much thought to how experienced users actually use flickr. Maybe they should hire Fraser to help them out with that?
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TED 2009 Write ups
A series of writeups of this year’s TED talks. I’ve particularly enjoyed the updates from Erik Hersman
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The Changing Role of Nonprofits
Amy Sample Ward’s reflections, driven by an interview she conducted with Clay Shirky while he was in London
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How Twitter Was Born
An early history of the web app that now dominates so many of our lives.
Route Blogging
Oct 12th
At dConstruct in Brighton last month Steven Johnson talked at length about his startup, outside.in, that collects together place-blogs to display aggregates commentary and information on a block, neighbourhood and city level. The site is US-only at the moment, which made it a curious presentation for a largely non-US audience. Their toolset for extracting geographical information from blog entries is impressive, but a number of us were talking afterwards about what the real value of such aggregation is for those who might already live in an information-rich or tightly knit neighbourhood.
I find outside.in handy for keeping up with news from Grand Rapids now that I no longer live there, but even if it were available in the UK I suspect its main use would be for identifying other local people rather than learning what’s going on. And even then, there are existing community discussion groups and other fora that work well.
What would seem really compelling is a way to connect with the places that only get our partial attention. A couple of times a week I take a bus past a local leisure centre. It’s not somewhere that I’m likely to use at the moment, but with big life changes coming up it may be somewhere I’m more interested in before long. It wasn’t until after the fact that I saw that it was the centre of some controversial planning decisions, far too late to engage in the debate.
We all travel along a variety of paths all the time. Often only a few of the places on our routes get much of our attention, but most of them are of some importance to us. I’d really like to have a site that was aware of my most common (or preferred) routes and helped me engage with them more deeply. Presumably it wouldn’t be much more work than that outside.in does to assemble place-blogs. That geo-data just needs to be mapped to a trajectory rather than a simple locale.