Blog posts

As I’ve indicated here a few times, when announcing site launches and offering a few hints and tips, I fairly frequently find myself working with Drupal but have long had reservations about doing so. What I’ve so far avoided doing is going into much detail about why that would be, what those reservations are, and so on. But now I’m working on a review of a Drupal book and so it seems appropriate to lay those cards on the table and look at the details on them. It seems easiest to do that by comparing with the framework I do most of my development in: Ruby on Rails. ...

Boboroshi | The Issue With Social Networks A good overview of the frustrations in working with multiple social networks, and a little musing on some tools that can be used to glue them together. (tags: aggregation socialnetworking) Facebook | SuperBadger “With SuperBadger you can send prewritten emails straight from your profile to the people making the decisions - whether it is badgering politicians about climate change or badgering supermarkets to stock more Fairtrade products, now is the time to s ...

I am not in this book’s target audience. Whereas the book is aimed at experienced java developers who are just getting started with rails and want to take advantage of JRuby, I’ve rarely touched Java but have lots of ruby and rails experience and am interested in JRuby mainly to see where I might be able to take advantage of java libraries, or ship my ruby apps into new contexts. In that respect, the book was helpful but there’s probably space for a companion volume for people like me. ...

Bamboo Blog - Google’s OpenSocial with Ruby on Rails A plugin and details of how to get your rails app ready to host OpenSocial widgets (tags: opensocial resources rubyonrails socialnetworking) OpenSocial: It’s the data, stupid “We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.” – or we want both… (tags: opensocial timoreilly) People Data API Developer’s Guide: Protocol - OpenSocial - Google Code ...

Track US Congressional Earmarks Via Google Earth Interesting. Apparently uses human input to add structured data (tags: googleearth participationtools sunlightfoundation uscongress) Merb-0.4.0 released with new site merbivore.com Looking really nice. I must get back into the merb app I was playing with a couple of months ago and see how it runs with this new release. (tags: framework merb ruby) Merb | Looking for a better framework? Celebrating the release of Merb 0.4 with a website for the framework ...

There have been rumours upon rumours that facebook was going to launch something for musicians soon, and that they were also readying a new advertising system. Today it turned out that not only were they doing both, but both are part of the same strategy. Announced by Leah Perlman on the Facebook blog, facebook’s new ads system breaks down into two parts: “Brands” can now create Facebook Pages, which combine some of the functionality of a personal profile with that of a group. For “brand” you can also read company, artist, campaign, or nearly anything else that might want to advertise. “Social Ads” allow Facebook to target ads at people based on their friends’ activities. So if I were to make a certain purchase, mark myself a fan of a band, or rent a given DVD, and facebook knows about it, facebook could tell my friends about that and sell them a related product. David Emery was quick to write up some thoughts on how this development could impact and help bands. While the immediate option to create a clear presence for something people might be “passionate about” is clearly significant, he’s absolutely right that it’s the “Social Ads” that have the potential to truly change the social advertising game as they leverage data more completely than has been done before. The intrusive possibility of them is potentially quite scary and as clear leaders in the field, we can only hope that facebook are making privacy central to this new approach. ...

With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay. ...

Restful Open ID Authentication in Identity A rails plugin combining restful_authentication and an OpenID consumer (tags: authentication openid plugins rubyonrails) Creating Printable Documents with Ruby I’ve been implementing PDF output for a rails app today. This was very handy. (tags: pdf rubyonrails)

Race/ethnicity and parent education differences in usage of Facebook and MySpace. Many-to-Many: More data for danah boyd’s research into racial/class factors in take up of differnet social networking sites. (tags: class economics ethnicity race socialnetworking socioeconomics) US Congress | drupal.org “Application Module that imports and manages Bills from the U.S. Library of Congress website as CCK nodes.” (tags: drupal government participationtools) Legislature | drupal.org “A generalized database for storing legislative data, such as bills, politicians, and votes.” (tags: drupal participationtools politics) Welcome to Debatepedia! - Debatepedia ...

blog.pmarca.com: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web Probably the best write-up on on OpenSocial so far. It seems like it may be a step in the right direction, but most of the information so far has been too confused. Done right, a way to write apps that run across the social networking sites would be great (tags: google opensocial socialnetworking) EC2 on Rails “a Ruby on Rails virtual appliance” – looking forward to playing with this ...