Selected Saturday Links

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days.

• Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. - broadstuff

  Critical commentary on facebook’s recent changes. I’m not sure I entirely agree with statements like “By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph” but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like “web of flow” (to steal Stowe Boyd’s phrase)

• Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden - O’Reilly Radar

  A more positive spin on facebook’s changes from David O’Recordon, who suspects they’re going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.

• Generation Open | FactoryCity

  “Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity.” - Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…

• Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

  Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit

• Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

  For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.

• scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

  A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.

• How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

  Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably

• Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

  Hosted solr for drupal: “Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site’s search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.”.

• Oauth using pecl/OAuth

  Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app

• Phusion Passenger 2.1.1 (beta) released, thanks sponsors! « Phusion Corporate Blog

  Rails 2.3.0 compatibility, Ruby 1.9 compatibility and, finally, fully working with mod_rewrite.

• Ryan’s Scraps: What’s New in Edge Rails: Batched Find

  Really pleased to see Model.each finally in ActiveRecord core

• Passenger-stack | Sprinkle scripts to provision your server quickly

  “Passenger stack is a collection of scripts for Marcus Crafter’s ‘Sprinkle’ tool, it allows you provision a standard Ruby on Rails / Rack server running Ruby Enterprise, Apache with Passenger, MySQL / Postgres and Memcached.” - looks like an easy way to automate VPS setup