See the Prototype announcement and the Scriptaculous announcement for more info and changelogs.

In short, it’s a lot faster, memory leaks are fixed, and there are a number of new features including sound support (which I don’t think I’d use, but which is still cool). I tried it out tonight in my personal work, and the […]

Posted in Ruby/Rails, Software Development, Javascript/AJAX No Comments »

Simply type “San Francisco real estate” or “homes for rent in Manhattan” in the Google search box. Below the sponsored links on the search results page it will say something like “Find results for homes for sale in manhattan in Housing search.”

Click on that to get a beautiful Google map populated with listings.

It’s a slick […]

Posted in Software Development, Javascript/AJAX, Google No Comments »

I’ve managed to get FastCGI running through Apache, and will be testing its performance in the context of Rails in the next few weeks. I haven’t done any formal testing, but it feels faster than my current Apache ProxyLoadBalancer -> Mongrel setup.

Posted in Ruby/Rails, Apache No Comments »

Firebug is an amazingly-useful web development and debugging tool that no web developer should be without. There’s a great article over at Coding Horror about it, if you want to learn more about it.

If you are a user, though, please update to the latest version (1.0.4 at the time of this writing) as a nasty […]

Posted in Software Development, Javascript/AJAX, CSS No Comments »

I’m back with another entry in my series on web design. If you missed it, here is part one.

Most every professional web site out there employees Javascript to some degree. With AJAX catching on as it is, Javascript is becoming more and more popular. Unfortunately, this means that more and more sites are breaking one […]

Posted in Software Development, Javascript/AJAX, Design No Comments »

Jeff Atwood has a good article today about the various open-source licenses. It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you don’t want to spend excessive amounts of time trying the decipher lawyerese (which is similar to programmerese except it reads like it’s written on a pay-per-word basis) when trying to figure out how you want […]

Posted in Software Development No Comments »

I remember creating my first web page back in the mid-90s. I was just learning how the whole internet thing worked and I eventually got ahold of a copy of Front Page Express and a Geocities account. The web was a different place back then - segmented and new, disjointed an unexplored. This was before the dotcom boom, and for the most part, it was a Great Unknown, a wild west populated by those who were to become the technical elite. We’ve come a long way in the past decade. CSS and standards, Web 2.0, AJAX, mashups and blogs, dotcoms and venture capital. The web is a different place than it was a decade ago, but there are some fundamental truths about the art and science of web design that have remained constant.

Posted in Design No Comments »

In the past few months, I’ve been heavily studying web development “best practices”. Semantically-valid content, separation of content from presentation, RESTful design, and graceful degradation on in the absence of certain technologies - all of that, and more.

My buddy Jon and I have been working on a project on the side, and I’ve learned […]

Posted in Software Development, Javascript/AJAX, Design, CSS 1 Comment »