Blog posts

In response to yesterday’s post about inlining CSS for HTML emails, I got a couple of comments suggesting alternatives to my CSS parser class. Not wanting to have to maintain code unless I have to, I decided to give them both a try and see how they worked out. TamTam First up is TamTam, suggested by batnight. I’d actually spotted TamTam and link blogged it a few weeks ago, which shows how transient attention can be. TamTam is a complete solution for inlining CSS, so I should be able to replace all my code with: ...

Riding Rails: Learn more about Rails 2.0 through video Linking to a nice set of videos about features coming in Rails 2.0 (or already here in Edge Rails or the pre-releases) (tags: rubyonrails tutorial video) Six Apart - News and Events: Beacons and Little Details “Here’s the story from our standpoint: We announced Beacon support on both LiveJournal and TypePad as initial launch partners. But we worked really hard with the Facebook team on one really important detail — making sure our implementations are c ...

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. ...

Laura Barton meets Andrew Bird | Rock | Guardian Unlimited Music (tags: andrewbird guardian interview music) Nick Cave: I was traumatised by bible | NME.COM A new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record will soon be with us: “The band release single ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ ahead of their 14th studio album on March 3, which shares the same title.” (tags: music nickcave nme)

When Ruby on Rails first hit the scene, what attracted many of us to it was ActiveRecord. By providing a declarative syntax for describing relationships, validations, and callbacks it provided an elegance to model code that makes programming a lot more fun. Over the past couple of years ActiveRecord has received a lot of love, with has_many :through and improved caching options being the key additions I’ve enjoyed. But despite all that it’s given, ActiveRecord is clearly not the last word in Object Relational Mappers and it’s been good to see increased attention for some alternative Ruby ORM s such as DataMapper. ...

The Rails startup process from a paragliders perspective - artweb design A nice overview of the Rails 2.0 request cycle (tags: initialization rails2.0 rubyonrails) CASH Music: Pay Zero to $1,000 for Varying Levels of Access to Music | Listening Post from Wired.com “If you want to pay more, you can. $500 gets you a visit into the studio to observe Hersh recording; $1000 gets you that plus a Featured Sponsor designation on her next CD; and for $5,000, you’d get both of those things plus an Executive Producer cre ...

Facebook appear to have given in to pressure over the debacle I wrote about a few days ago. According to their announcement: Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice. ...

Practical Rails Projects is a weighty tome, coming in just shy of 600 pages, which led to this review taking a little longer than it otherwise might: not just because the book took a while to get through, but also because it wasn’t quite so practical to lug it on the bus as some of the others I’ve recently covered. A result of that heft is a fairly comprehensive volume, but one that doesn’t feel quite so consistent as it perhaps should. ...

24 ways: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 Great. I’ve used Drew’s previous sleight script numerous times, so the new Super Sleight seems like a great addition to the toolkit (tags: 24ways internetexplorer png) Mediamatic Lab releases PHP OAuth server and client « OAuth (tags: api oauth php) Acquia, my Drupal startup | Dries Buytaert With his studies coming to an end Dries Buytaert is forming a company that will let him work on drupal core professionally. Good to hear discussion of drupal 7 becoming more of a data repository with APIs a plenty. ...

WorldChanging: Meet Me in Grand Rapids WorldChanging seem quite taken with our former home (tags: grandrapids greenbuilding worldchanging) Nativity scene recast with security barrier for ‘Kitschmas’ | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited Covering Amos Trust’s “walled nativity set” (tags: amostrust nativityset)