There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Ruby on Rails users toward Ruby skeptics or critics has been less than kind. This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know. I only have a simple advice for these people: you might be right, but just be humble. It never hurts.
Category: Web
Derek’s tired of “user‐generated content” as a buzzword. In addition to what’s listed here, what pisses me off about this trend is that some startups think that they won’t have to provide any content at all. If your only source of content is the user, then your app’s value is strongly correlated to the size of your userbase. Which means that when you start your application will be worthless. How do you get people to sign up for something that has no worth?
In order to stop myself from shoehorning random not‐quite‐blog‐posts into the “link” post type, I’ve created a new type: thoughts. I’m really hoping this idea will take off — it’s time for us, as webloggers, to occasionally stray from the beaten path of absolute fact and express opinions! I’m going to be a goddamned pioneer. (In other news, my feeds now contain full post text and HTML, as they should’ve a long time ago. I beg forgiveness.)
Stylable Text Fields in WebKit. Safari, which for eons has had the least‐customizable form controls among major browsers, will have the most‐customizable form controls when this code makes it into a release.
Since its release, FireBug has been on my short list of must‐have extensions for any sort of web development, but the recently‐released 0.3 version launches it right to the top of the list. I’m finding I use it even more than the Web Developer Toolbar.
I’ve been a cautious supporter of efforts to address global warming — I’m sure it’s happening, but have always wondered if the horror‐story predictions were exaggerated — but Bill Maher’s monologue at the end of Real Time last night got me on board, unequivocally and enthusiastically. (Why can’t politicians inspire me the same way?) Beg, borrow, or steal in order to watch it yourself. You won’t regret it.
8 Web Design Warm Fuzzy Feelings. When I checked this blog’s design in IE for the first time and saw that I didn’t have anything to fix, I went to my fridge and had a beer. I don’t know if that will ever happen again.
You live in Japan and your internet is that slow? I thought you guys find 50mb/s free in cereal boxes.
CSS event:Selectors. As CSS selector syntax is used more and more in DOM scripting, I must wonder: why did we settle on the DOM API for client‐side scripting? CSS selectors and XPath are much more terse and versatile.
Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!