Category: Projects

Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Learning the Rails

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Learning the Rails

I’m taking a week off of active programming to focus on better understanding 3 aspects of Rails development I’ve been wistfully ignoring: Migrations, Testing, and Deployment.

There’s a tiny, fun little project I’m using as the venue for these subjects.

One week from today (May 1) is what I’m giving myself on this effort. Any longer and it’ll be a distraction rather than a learning exercise.

I’ve always have a conceptual issue with Migrations. While migrations make it super easy to iteratively change the database, I’m accustomed to having the database a rock solid representation of, well, the database. My inclination is to look in and modify the database directly, then within create_[model].rb, then within schema.rb. Having bits of the model strewn about numerous migration files feels messy.

I’ll get used to it. Probably even savor it once I wrap my head around it.

Thursday, 8 March 2007

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

QSPress – Quicksilver and WordPress Make Me Twitter

by Garrick van Buren 3 Comments on QSPress – Quicksilver and WordPress Make Me Twitter

I’m with Aaron, I don’t quite get Twitter. If you want to know what’s on my mind…read this blog. What I do get about is really, really fast publishing. The faster, the better.

So, I cooked up a little script (11 lines) to post directly to this blog from Quicksilver. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, or blog that understands the MetaWeblogAPI (though, I’ve only tested it on WP).

So, if you want to twitter on your own blog…download QSPress.

The posts look something like this and hey, no character limits. 😉

More on the QSPress page

LATER:
Eric, I say this script is proof XML-RPC isn’t dead.

Last time I checked, Flickr’s ‘blog this’ was XML-RPC. Copy-and-Paste and XML-RPC are two different things. C-and-P exists because video needs at least one ’embed’ tag and well, that’s hard. Add to that, XML-RPC needs an end-point url and a password, that’s a level of complexity above – ‘here take this code’. They serve two different functions – though the final product looks similar.

Thursday, 5 October 2006

Introducing the HijackingWP Script

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Introducing the HijackingWP Script

One of my biggest problems with podcasting is the production process. Even without editing the audio, the process is far too manual to repeat without inherent discouragement (65 podcasts in year 1 and 20 in year 2 should speak to that).

In an effort to publish more and make podcasting as effortless as writing this post, I spent a couple hours last night writing the HijackingWP script.

It’s a little Applescript glue to connect AudioHijackPro (recording), Transmit (uploading), and WordPress (publishing and distribution).

More info at the HijackingWP page.

Oh, and yes, First Crack 86 proves it works. 😉

Wednesday, 4 October 2006

Sunday, 8 January 2006

Thursday, 18 August 2005

What’s Your Favorite Open Source Project?

by Garrick van Buren 2 Comments on What’s Your Favorite Open Source Project?

Hello gentle reader, I’m looking for your favorite open source projects; applications, websites, services. If the code is available for free and you’re a big fan, throw them in the comments.

    I’ll start:
    WordPress – weblog engine and content management system
    Ruby on Rails – web application framework
    CocoaMySQL – OS X desktop MySQL database manager
    Adium – Multi-protocol Instant Messaging client

Tuesday, 17 May 2005

Friday, 6 May 2005

Your Attention.xml Please

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Your Attention.xml Please

If you haven’t heard me proclaim, “RSS killed the visual web designer”, now you have.

Quickly stated, RSS is a structured format for distributing text, audio (podcasting), video (vlogging), even applications in a convenient and anonymous way.

For the publisher, RSS means the timeliness of email without the worry about spam filtering. For the reader, RSS means the convenience of email with the anonymity of a web page.

The downside is metrics.

Measuring behavior on websites is always nebulous. Robots, routers, giant ISPs can all throw off numbers. For publishers RSS doesn’t really help this problem. For readers, there’s a slightly different problem – once you’ve aggregated your 200 favorite websites into a single place, what do you pay attention to.

Cody and I have been talking about Attention.xml solving the both problems.

I’m interested in how Attention.xml can tighten the publisher-reader relationship and help readers share what’s interesting to them with friends. While also giving Cody and I better numbers on our respective podcasts.

More thoughts and prototypes on this later.

Thursday, 5 May 2005

When the Internet is Slow, It’s Frustrating

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on When the Internet is Slow, It’s Frustrating

I’ve got an announcement to make. Some of you lucky folks already know about it. Actually, the only people that don’t know about it aren’t reading this.

Huh. That actually makes me feel better.

Still, I anxiously await
for the DNS to propagate.

It’s official – PodcastMN is up.