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Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! DHH’s announcement of Rails 2.0 (tags: frameworks gems rails ruby rubyonrails web2.0) Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog this morning apologizing for missteps with the roll-out of their much maligned Beacon advertising system.” (tags: beacon debacle facebook privacy) Softies on Rails: Softies on Rails Interviews: Orbitz Nice interviews with one of the guys from Orbitz about why they decided to use Ruby on Rails for a new product development ...

Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling. Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site. ...

All reports, and the evidence of the subversion commit log, says Ruby on Rails 2.0 will be with us very shortly. Apparently the announcement has been delayed until the gems have properly circulated. For those who’ve not been following, Rails 2.0 isn’t going to seem like a huge step forward as it’s mainly focussed on cleaning up existing features, and moving quite a few out of the core and into plugins. ...

Creative Business : Blog Archive » Substitutes and complements (tags: economics futureofmusic marketing musicindustry) Comet works, and it’s easier than you think (tags: comet javascript) Producing, not consuming, makes the GeoWeb go ’round. « Into The Pudding Arguing that if you’re producing something with geographical content (an event, a news story, etc), you should publish the geographical information to go with it. (tags: georss neogeography)

We first stumbled across St. Vincent by accident when she opened for John Vanderslice at one of the last Calvin concerts before we moved away from Grand Rapids. While Mr. Vanderslice put on a fine show, I couldn’t help but feel that St. Vincent upstaged him with a much more striking set of songs, culminating in a near-perfect cover of Jackson Browne’s These Days. ...

shaunandrews.com » Using a retainer in the web world Includes a sample retainer agreement. Very handy. (tags: management retainer webwork) Massive Passport Canada data leak - Boing Boing A quite remarkable oversight in the security arrangements (tags: dataprotection security) evang.eli.st User stories with RSpec’s Story Runner Story Runner is to rspec as integration tests are to test::unit. Still trying to decide if I like the syntax. (tags: bdd rspec storyrunner userstories)

Beth Rowley - iTunes single of the week Good news for Beth. Well worth checking out if you have access to iTunes UK (tags: bethrowley itunes)

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. ...