Hpricot

A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter— Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore. ...

Working with a number of non-profits I frequently find myself tasked with extending or upgrading drupal. Each new version of drupal has been a significant step forward and I’m usually keen to get up to date but there’s the small matter of the suite of modules most sites use that need to catch up with changing APIs. With the release of Drupal 6 a few weeks back I found myself wanting a tool that would help me check if my chosen modules were ready for the upgrade yet. ...

As anyone keeping an eye on my deli.cio.us feed may have noticed, quite a few links have appeared to information about the preparation of HTML email. It’s a nasty business, as a quick glance at the website of the email standards project will tell you. But sadly, nasty as it may be, sometimes it has to be done. Even if the email I send out is going to have CSS scattered inline, for building the templates I’d much rather be able to focus on writing the structure of the document and leave worrying about my CSS for another time, and another file. That wouldn’t get me around the nastiness of having to use tables for anything but the simplest of layouts, but it still feels right to keep the separation for as long as possible. ...

Rails is great for many things, but for very small apps, it can definitely be overkill. That’s where why the lucky stiff’s Camping micro-framework comes in. Where rails gets you started with a clearly defined structure and generally presumes you’re going to want to use a database, Camping makes no such assumptions and just provides a few nice hooks for micro apps. I got started using Camping a couple of months ago. With a lot of travel coming up, I’m eager to keep up to date with special deals on flights and frequent flyer miles, and stumbled across milemaven.com which seemed a great source of that information. But it doesn’t provide feeds and I have no desire to visit the site every day, so I decided to dust off hpricot and combine it with Camping to scrape the site and deliver the contents to my news reader. ...

In the process of building my bus route app, I realised that half the data for bus stops is missing. While the site’s developers have done a good job of providing clear data on half the stops, if you want to see stops going in the other direction, you have to use a drop-down box that triggers an AJAX request and repopulates the table. A little digging shows that the call is to: ...

The Rapid, the bus service for Grand Rapids and surrounding areas, recently redesigned their website. The redesign was long overdue and the result certainly looks a lot cleaner, if still far from inspiring. They’ve added a flash-based map showing their routes (though it could do with being a little larger on the page) and added PDF maps of each route (eg. this one for Route 6)). Unfortunately as yet there’s no tool for working out routes, but that’s not a big surprise. ...