If you’re looking to build RIA’s using Ruby on Rails you should check out the OpenLaszlo gem that provides Rich Flash output for your Rails views. There is also a Rails plugin to hook it all up for easy generation of OpenLaszlo applets.
The Particletree weblog has a great tutorial on Preloading Data with Ajax and JSON. This is a neat technique to help speed up the responsiveness of your web applications.
Michael Arrington has a nice Summary of Nine Web Startups founded by entrepreneurs who are less than 27 years old during the recent E27 Summit hosted by Stanford University.
Over the last few years there have been many studies on the popularity of authoring techniques such as what HTML ids and classes are most common. The most recent study was done by Google. Their study on Web Authoring Statistics is quite interesting and shows many statistics for authoring behaviour in the following groups…
So you figured you’d wait a while to upgrade your Wordpress Blog from version 1.x to 2.0. A month has now passed since the v2.0 release and a new list of 10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0 has just been released. A good read if you’re planning to do an upgrade.
Bubble Tooltips is some more CSS magic from Alessandro Fulciniti that creates some very nice Javascript and CSS based tooltips. As with other scripts from Alessandro, this one uses unobtrusive Javascript and degrades perfectly!
If you use Wordpress and are big fans of social networking sites like del.icio.us, digg.com and furl.net, you might want to checkout Sociable. This Wordpress plugin provides quick access to many popular social bookmarking services by adding icons to your posts.
The Contest pays a bounty to the first person to post instructions on how to dual boot Windows XP on the new Intel Macs. The contest was created by Colin Nederkoorn who seeded the contest with $100 and via PayPal donations, the bounty has grown to a whopping $4831! I donated my $25 - have you?
I came across this JavaScript regular expression a while ago that uses regular expressions to create excerpts from a larger block of text. You can specify the number of characters in the excerpt by simply changing the second value within the braces in the regular expression. For example use {1,55} to create an excerpt 55 characters long or {1,101} to create an excerpt 101 characters long. Of course the best part is that the phrase will always truncate on a whitespace character!
var s = "This regex can be used to break a long ";
s += "line of text on a full word. The qualifiers ";
s += "specify the minimum and maximum number ";
s+= "of character allow before the break and can ";
s+= "be changed according to your needs";
var result = s.match(/^([\\s\\S]){1,30}([\\s\\.])/)
document.write(result[0] + " ");
I cannot remember where I got this from, but thought that I would share it with the community as I have found it to be extremely useful.
FreeNAS is a Free Network Attached Storage (NAS) server that will turn an old PC into a NAS server complete with a web based administration console. FreeNAS is a scaled down FreeBSD distribution and supports Samba, FTP, NFS protocols, and Software RAID (0,1,5). FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.
