Blog posts

There are so many self-styled “Web 2.0” sites awaiting launch that I’ve completely lost track of where I’ve signed up for announcements. The latest surprise to land in my mailbox was the test code for edgeio, a distributed classified ads service. Edgeio provides a ping service that publishers can notify of new items for sale listed on their site. Items tagged with ’listing’ are added to their database, and purchasers can use the edgeio site as a directory of those listings. It’s an interesting idea, and a service that was bound to happen pretty soon, but I have a few questions about the implementation. ...

Seemingly along with the vast majority of other web developers, I’m in the midst of a few projects developed in Ruby, based on and using Rails. This is one bandwagon I’m happy to jump on, and so far much of the hyperbole seems deserved. I spent quite a bit of time today working out how I could use Ruby’s mixins to dynamically populate my objects with methods based on a user’s role within my application. I have a controller that I want both vendors and admins to be able to use, but I want each of them to be able to access a different set of methods, often with the same names. Rather than implement checks in each method, or even using callbacks to dispatch appropriately, I wondered if my main controller could simply mixin the methods it needed at runtime. ...

I was reminded by maxi_million in the comments on one of my previous LiveUser tutorial entries that I never completed the promised third entry in that series. After the initial procrastination wore off and I initially turned my mind to writing this piece, my main project using LiveUser ended up being converted (for various reasons) into a drupal site, so my further use of the library has been quite minimal. But I do have a little code sitting around, so will try and draw together a few notes on how I was using Liveuser. ...

Tom Coates and Simon Willison are among a number of bloggers who’ve written about Yahoo’s release of a number of their javascript libraries, interface design patterns, and other elements for use by the community. I’ve not yet had a chance to explore them, but they look like a great contribution and I look forward to finding the time. But my main reason for posting was the content of this screenshot from the design patterns page. Yusef is my middle name (and my maternal grandfather’s first name), but it’s rare that I come across anyone sharing not only the name but the latin-alphabet rendering of it. It’s nice to see the name being promoted like that!

My particular focus this year as a member of the Greenbelt web team is on finding ways to better integrate festival related content with the wider web, and then working out how to use the festival’s website as a hub for all of that information. It started out with the collage that we built using flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and blog entries around the festival last year, and the next step (the first longer term one) is integration with last.fm. ...

I’ve posted another entry over at my last.fm blog.

I’m experimenting with posting music-related entries in my last.fm journal, and that’s where you’ll find the entry referred to in the title here. The plan is to splice the blogs together, so that this becomes a hub for everything, but there’s little telling when that’ll actually happen so in the meantime I’ll post links here when I’ve blogged there. You can find this entry at: http://www.last.fm/user/jystewart/journal/2006/01/30/67793/

When I was looking for options to offset our airmiles I noted and commented on a significant difference between the carbon production estimates, and the cost to offset it, from NativeEnergy and Carbonfund.org. I remarked on this in the comments box when placing my order with NativeEnergy and today received the following response from Lauren Aldrich at NativeEnergy, which she has said I’m welcome to post here: Thank you for asking about the CO2 emissions and price discrepancies between NativeEnergy and Carbonfund. It’s important to us that our customers understand why these differences exist, because there are good reasons. ...

One of the best features of freelance work is that when Kari has to travel for work, I can often tag along. Last year that took us to Colorado, and this year to Arizona, for a couple of days just outside Phoenix and a couple more in beautiful Sedona. Our photos are at flickr.

The MySQL developers seem to be developing a habit of rolling out useful new features in their .1 releases. MySQL 4 was a good release, but it’s the group_concat feature from 4.1 that I miss most often when forced to use a 3.x or 4.0 install. MySQL 5 made some huge leaps forward, but already there’s plenty of talk about the new features coming in 5.1. In particular, I’m looking forward to support for XPath and event scheduling. ...