I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails (I wrote about my initial adventure already) in the basement while watching Big Brother and tonight, I’ve actually made real progress!!\
Maybe it’s being on vacation and not compulsively checking mail every five minutes, but I got the login stuff working, and I can actually create real records, submit them and then see them! I’ll work on updating them tomorrow night, and then on to the second model.\
When I get closer to being sure that I’ve got something I’ll actually launch, I’ll spill more details, but I think it could be a lot of fun. It’s built around something that’s really popular, but totally underserved by both large companies and the startups considered to be in the whole “Web 2.0” thing. Hopefully, it’ll fill a niche that’s not been filled yet, and I won’t make a mess of it. So far, so good.\
Maybe this would go smoother if I actually learned Ruby…
Category: development
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Progress on Rails
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PayPal Seeks DOM Nerd for Unobtrusive Servitude
I got an e-mail from Steve Ganz asking if anyone knew any javascript wizard who need a job. I met Steve at SXSW and he’s swell (he’s also on the microformats discussion list, which is also a +1 in my book). He’s looking for a javascript expert to help take PayPal out of the 90’s and into today (his words, not mine).\
If you’re interested, go bug him. And none of you guys who work with me better leave, or I’ll hunt you down. -
Child Scripts Making Child Scripts!
I’ve been wrestling with a bug in one of my modules for AIM Pages for_ever_, and just found a fix today. I created this well-intentioned module called code snippet that allows you to paste in markup and it’ll get inserted into the DOM. This is really just a stopgap to allow people to add stuff that a module doesn’t exist for yet. I never should have written it. Do you know how bad DOM support is in IE? It’s awful!\
The big problem is that people wanted/needed to insert script elements with inline script using the code snippet module, and I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it (ok, any way, good or otherwise). Just adding them to the DOM using innerHTML doesn’t work. IE won’t allow you to create a new script element and set the text content to the code.\
Today, I stumbled on a message board post that hints at the answer. What’s the answer?\
Create a new script element, and set the text property to the script content and then append it to the body. Voila, actual evaluated javascript! Here’s an example:<code>var b=document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; var txt="function doIt(msg) {alert(msg)}"; var scr=document.createElement("script"); scr.setAttribute("type","text/javascript"); scr.text=txt; b.appendChild(scr);</code>
Enjoy! Oh, and the fixed version of the module isn’t live yet. I’m letting the QA guys look at it first before I unleash it on an unsuspecting world.
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Why My Site Has Been Down
I love Dreamhost a lot and usually highly recommend them to everyone, but recently, they’ve had some real problems keeping everything up and running around here. I was glad to see them blog about the trouble and what they’re doing to fix it. I love transparency.
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Presentation Remote Solved
Instead of forking over over \$30 for a new remote to use for presentations, I found mira a little System Preference pane that lets me map the buttons on my brand new MacBook Pro’s remote to other applications. It took about 45 seconds of fiddling to get forward/back mapped to the up and down arrows and voila, I have a presentation remote.\
I love Mac developers. If I’ve got a problem, there’s usually a beautifully designed easy to use solution already out there. -
Rails, Wow
I’ve been flirting with it for a while (have had the book since it came out and installed Rails all over the place, just never had time to get into it), but last night I broke down and built my first web application with Ruby on Rails and all I have to say is wow. That was way easier than it should have been. Granted, it was painfully simple, but still, it was about an hour total between setting up the domain and database on Dreamhost to getting it tweaked and looking like I wanted (oh, and working). It was another 5 minutes with the book this morning to get the export feature working like I wanted (well, they wanted).\
Next time I need to build something outside of work (or hell, maybe inside of work), it’ll most likely be in Rails. -
6 Years and Still Blogging
This blog is six years old today. Now, I was planning a big retrospective, but the archives are all there and you can go browse through all 1845 entries. Six years of blogging and I’ve managed to spew out over 1800 entries (Jen’s posted too, which I’ll talk about in a little bit), and people have posted over 1600 comments, and I didn’t have comments for the first year of the blog when it was over on Blogger.\
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The blog started out orange, and with spacemen, and went through quite a few different designs (some of which I don’t even remember). Thankfully, Jen decided to join the party and I came up with the design we’ve got now, based on a photo Jen took on our trip to Bethany Beach last summer.\
So here we are, six years of blogging about my life, my family, some about work and about other assorted nonsense. You know, I don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon. I go through phases where I don’t post for a week or so, but I always come back. I always find some other reason to come back and write. It’s become a part of my life, and things may change around again (you never know), but lawver.net will probably always be some sort of blog.\
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Thanks, blog, for holding all the nonsense, and for keeping an archive of me over the past six years. Thank you Blogger and thank you Movable Type. -
Mashup Camp Video
Holly did some filming and made a cool little video about Mashup Camp. You’ll only be able to see this entry if Dreamhost isn’t still having “issues”.
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Ummm, I Work For Who?
Christine Herron blogged about our Microformats and API’s panel at Mashup Camp and only got one little thing wrong… I don’t work for Yahoo, never have. I work for AOL and am quite happy here. Maybe I need to get a tattoo…
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Revenge Of The Coolest AIM Pages Feature Ever
The web page as service thing I talked about before is live now, and I’ve built my first module that uses it. If you go to my profile, you’ll see a little module in the left-hand column called shared buddies (if you want to see the source) that, if you’re logged in and have a profile, will grab the buddy gallery and see which buddies we share. Isn’t that cool?\
I’m looking for other ideas for modules to mash up people’s pages, so be on the lookout for other cool stuff. If you’ve got ideas, please post a comment!