Author Archives: Garrick van Buren

Ruby on Rails Snippet for Changing Relative Paths to Absolute

If you have a bunch of text containing relative path hyperlinks, and you’d like to change to them to absolute paths, you might find this snippet helpful. content = “some text with a <a href=’/path/to/relative_link/’>relative link</a>” link = “http://somedomain.com/” content.gsub(/=(‘|”)//, ‘=1*/’).gsub(/*//, link.match(/(http|https)://[w.]+//)[0]) The asterisk ‘*’ is a hackey placeholder for the actual link swapped in …

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Book Curation

“…we are going smaller, we are going less.” – Bodo von Hodenberg, bookseller – Bildschöne Bücher, Berlin Germany BTW – I found this link on my economics reading list in Cullect which proves (at least to me) that good curation is about both depth and discovery.

Quoted in APM’s ‘The Pork Wars on YouTube’

As part of APM’s Public Insight Journalism program, I was interviewed as about the use of sites like YouTube for political issues (vs. campaigns) – specifically in the context of the recent tennis match between animal rights groups vs farm industry groups. Here’s the bit of my interview they used on-air and online. “Garrick Van …

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Jon Gordon’s Twin Cities Coffee WiFi Google Map Started

Jon Gordon‘s going to be in the Twin Cities for a while and he thought it’d be fun to review the local selection of independent coffee + wifi shops. As part of that effort, I’ve started a Google Map for listing and pin-pointing these places. There’s also a handful of invites floating around to for …

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Diversified Rhino Guarding

“If you’re building on someone else’s platform, whenever they are down, you are down. There is no way around that.” – Brian Breslin on why TwitBin development is stalled. A year ago, I wrote about my hesitation of building on someone else’s platform. Since then, I launched Cullect. Which is nothing if not built atop …

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The State of Dense Comparisons

One of my biggest pet peeves is comparisons of the U.S to other countries – especially European countries – to show how the U.S. is “behind” in some nationwide attribute like healthcare, broadband speeds/adoption, public transit. My first issue with these comparisons is one of scale. The United States is closer to the European Union …

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For Sale: Lief’s Green House in Nordeast Mpls

Looks like Leif Utne bought a 1-way ticket on the high-speed underground tunnel between Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest. “Pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested in a beautifully-remodeled, energy-efficient home close to bus lines on a safe, quiet street in an artsy neighborhood. It has a brand-new kitchen and furnace …

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