Content Labels

Mar 102007

I was out with Paul Walsh from Segala earlier this week and he was going over the concept of Content Labels. I think this sounds like a very interesting proposal and something I will be more than happy to get behind. He outlines the concept in plain English in this post

It will be very interesting to see how this standard develops. It also got me to thinking how good it would be if we could come up with a ‘Wisdom of the Crowds” version for self certification and to encompass the long, long tail of the web.

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FreeYourID / OpenID

Mar 102007

So I’m a little late in posting about this, its probably been almost a month since the guys over at GNR (Global Name Registry) pointed me to their new site at freeyourid.com. But, the OpenID movement is just gaining momentum and there is still plenty of time left to go and get your very own .name email and OpenID url.

The site is very slick and well worth a look even if you don’t fancy signing up (although I can’t think of any reason why). You get your id free for 3 months and then its $10 a year, bargain.

ActiveScaffold RC1 Released

Mar 102007

So after a lot of work (mostly done by the three other members of the team – Richard White, Lance Ivy and Ed Moss) the new shiny version of AjaxScaffold has reached RC1 and is available under its new name ActiveScaffold.

Richard White gives a bit more info about it on his blog.

This will pretty much draw to a close this blog being used for the docs as AjaxScaffold will get an EOL stamp once ActiveScaffold reaches v1.0. So thank you to all who have given us feedback and supported the project so far.

Ruby Time Functions Rock!!

Feb 042007

I haven’t had much cause to play with the Time module in Ruby until today. I have used Time.now quite a bit, but not too much more than that. However, today I had to find the last 6 months names to label a graph and in a short period of time I had come up with this:

months = ['Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec']
labels = []
0.upto(5) do |x|
  labels.unshift(months[Time.now.months_ago(x).month-1])
end

Which I think is pretty neat, especially remembering what a pain it was in Perl last time I had to do it……..

They lost my CSS

Feb 012007

I’m not entirely sure how this has happened, I suspect that RailsPlayground has moved to 1.2.1 (without telling anyone), but it appears that this blog no longer has styles………

Brilliant. My apologies.

Anyway, gonna freeze to 1.1.6 for the mo, so hopefully that should fix it.

AjaxScaffold 3.2.3 Released

Jan 232007

We released a new version of AS today which fixes the issues with prototype and rico when using Rails 1.2.1. For details of the issue you can see my previous post.

This is simply a fix for the v3 plugin and contains none of the new (and very exciting stuff) coming in v4. It should be a straight upgrade for anyone on 3.2.2.

AjaxScaffold and Rails 1.2.1

Jan 222007

There is an issue with the latest release of Rails and AjaxScaffold. Well actually the problem is in a conflict between Prototype and Rico Corner, if you find that all the AJAX stops working – lots of spinning indicators and not much else you have three choices, wait a little and we will likely release an update, or if you are impatient / desperate for a fix you can use the following patch for prototype or you can remove the Rico Corner include……

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A Little Harsh

Jan 162007

So, it turns out the Amazon links thing is actually ok on the individual post pages, just not here on the main page of the site. I guess that in any indiviual post the relative frequencies of words are sufficient to mean the algorithm is effective. Whereas here the dilution of many posts means it harder to get right.

I still th ink it could be a lot better though, not like they are short of cash or developers!!!!

Val D’Isere

Jan 162007

I just got back from a weeks boarding in the French resort of Val D’Isere. One of my favourite resorts in the Alps. I have never had a bad week there. The rest of the Alps can have less snow than the Sahara, but, Val always delivers. Plus you get views like this from the top of the Grand Mott (3,400m, and yes it is in Tignes but it is all one pass…….):



That was taken with the Nokia N80 phone!!!

Self Optimizing Links – Not!!

Dec 282006

So, not sure what algorithm Amazon are using to power their self optimizing links, but it doesn’t work – the books haven’t really changed in the 35 days its been on my blog. Of course I could be the exception but it seems to me to be, well, crap.

Quite disappointing really, I would of thought it would be possible to be a lot more targeted, especially as I already have links to their site from my posts so even returning the “others have bought” books would be an order of magnitude increase in performance.

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