Weekly Digest, 6-11-09

by Trevor Turk

In this edition, Timothy moves to Washington DC and Trevor trims down his “watch list” on GitHub and shares many interesting projects with you via his delicious feed.

Trevor’s Links

Email. Twice daily. No more, no less.

So, using some motivation from The Four Hour Workweek1, I opted to come back to the studio and change my behavior. That morning, I emailed my entire team and my clients to let them know that I would only be checking my email at 10am and 4pm each day.

How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of

Many web sites allow users to casts vote on items. These visitors’ votes are then often used to detect the items’ “popularity” and hence rank the rated items accordingly. And when “rank” comes into play things gets tricky…

Online communities, etc.

Anyway, I’m bored on a long bus drive and there’s no real moral to the story here, just writing. I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.

Really Simple Rails Log Rotatation

I always used logrotate Linux tool to setup log rotation for my Rails apps which has worked fine although it required finding some external config file and understanding its config options and syntax. [Great tip for development/test environments. Might not be a good idea in production?]

Instapaper bookmarklet, modified to close the current tab

I modified the bookmarklet slightly so that the tab closes immediately, without disturbing the pop-up. This way, saving something for later is one simple action, instead of two.

DeliciousSafari

Use and create Delicious bookmarks from the Safari web browser.

So, about this Shopify Platform

The Shopify platform allows any programmer to create applications that integrate natively with the administration interface or storefront. These applications can be written in any language and communicate with Shopify using our handcrafted REST API. We even provide some amazing rails generators to get started quickly.

Introducing Trample: A Better Load Simulator

Most load sim tools make requests to a static list of urls. They spawn n threads and make requests to the urls on the list in succession, in each thread. Unfortunately, though, if your applicaition makes use of any kind of caching (including your database’s internal caching facilities), this kind of load simulation is unrealistic.

TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker

TOSBack keeps an eye on 44 website policies. Every time one of them changes, you’ll see an update here.

Twitter Blog: Not Playing Ball

We do recognize an opportunity to improve Twitter user experience and clear up confusion beyond simply removing impersonation accounts once alerted. We’ll be experimenting with a beta preview of what we’re calling Verified Accounts this summer.

cdto

Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd’d to the front most finder window. This app is designed (including it’s icon) to placed in the finder window’s toolbar.

Trevor’s GitHub Links

quirkey’s sammy

Sammy is a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery inspired by Ruby’s Sinatra.

kabuki’s heresy

Heresy is a schema free wrapper around your database, heavily inspired by both CouchDB and FriendFeed.

paulmars’s seven_minute_abs

ab testing for rails

binarylogic’s searchlogic at v2

Searchlogic has been completely rewritten for v2. It is much simpler and has taken an entirely new approach. To give you an idea, v1 had ~2300 lines of code, v2 has ~350 lines of code.

semanticart’s is_paranoid

ActiveRecord 2.3 compatible gem “allowing you to hide and restore records without actually deleting them.” Yes, like acts_as_paranoid, only implemented differently…

brynary’s webrat