While doing a quick redesign of a site this weekend, I ran into a few things that I wanted to do in CSS that I didn’t know how to do. As usual, it was CSSTricks.com to the rescue. In addition to AListApart and the excellent Pro CSS Techniques book by Apress, I can’t recommend this site enough to those looking to stay on top of the latest CSS techniques. The articles are great, and he has an amazing series of well-produced screencasts, demonstrating some of the most useful techniques.
If you’re designing web pages and don’t have every possible computer and browser combination handy, BrowserShots.org can come in handy. It shows the display from any URL in virtually every OS and browser combo that is actively developed today (sadly, no testing for the AOL browser). You can also limit screen resolution, disable Javascript, Flash or color depth. You just select what browsers you want to test for and you get full-sized downloadable screenshots of the display from each browser in about a minute. What a country!
This is pretty dumb, but it works in a pinch.
I had less than an hour to work on getting slideshows of my restaurant photos from Flickr into my FoodStalker site, so I didn’t have time to dig into the Flickr API or even to mess with rflickr. Here was my quick and dirty solution:
I got the idea from this post on how to embed flickr slideshows, and modified the code to include a regular expression in Ruby that removes the whitespace and periods and downcases my restaurant names, so that flickr will match the restaurants in my database with tags in my flickr account (as all flickr tag searches must contain only lowercase letters with no whitespace).
The obvious downside, is that it’s not so customizable (other than the size of the slideshow), so I’ll eventually dig into rflickr and make a proper slideshow, but for 2 minutes of coding, it does the job.
Unthirsty.com is another great idea for a GoogleMap based site that I came across while looking for inspiration. You tell it where you are and what time you’d like to drink, and you get a list of bars that have happy-hour specials at the given time plotted on a map. You can also search for multiple criteria, such as outdoor seating, and Wi-Fi.
The app was originally written in PHP, but was rewritten in Rails about a year ago, and there are some interesting notes on the developer’s blog about the process.
I’m a little surprised that I haven’t found more people writing about Heroku. As painful as Rails deployment generally is, Heroku seems like magic. After getting a beta invite, you can create Rails applications through their web interface that are immediately deployed with zero configuration. You seriously don’t have to do anything.
And for those who find the web interface pokey, and would rather work locally in Textmate, you can clone your app and create a local Git repository to work from and simply do a ‘git push’ when you’re ready to deploy a new version of your app.
If you’re looking to check out Rails by coding a live app, this is a pretty hard setup to beat. Even if you don’t have Rails installed on your machine, you could just create a site entirely in the web interface and deploy it with zero configuration.
My only question is how much this will cost, once they get out of beta and start charging for it.
I’ve been using it for a few weeks on a food website I’m working on (foodstalker.com), and I’ve been really amazed by the slickness of the experience. It really has to be seen to be believed.
I’ve been using Slicehost VPS (Virtual Private Server) for a while now, and it really couldn’t be better. I’m not using it for any serious apps or sites, but it’s been a great way to learn server administration. For as little as $20 a month (for 256MB of dedicated RAM), you get root access to a virtual machine (a slice).
You can choose between many flavors of Linux and install everything yourself via SSH and if everything goes wrong, you can just login to their control panel and click ‘Rebuild Slice’, pick your Linux version and you’ll have a clean install of Linux in a minute or two.
Combined with the tutorials on the site for setting up almost every conceivable configuration of Rails stacks, Slicehost is a cheap and easy way to learn how to serve Rails apps.
I came across this amazing list of tips when I was searching for how to do something in CSS. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but I was glad I found it.
It’s full of great tips, guidelines and best practices from someone who clearly lives and breathes CSS. He succinctly fills you in on a million CSS subtleties that would take years figure out on your own. This is what I love about the internet. You’re sure to find something on this list that you haven’t thought of before.
He also has a few other lists of tips (usability, accessability, etc.) that are equally amazing.
I met a cool guy at the NYCRuby meeting on Tuesday who had made this site in Rails called Opening Times. He lives in the U.K., so it’s only useful if you live there. However, I thought it was a great example of an application that doesn’t try to do everything, but does one thing really well.
You type in your location and it shows the shops near you on a Google Map, and indicates with an icon whether they are open or not. I just like the minimalism and restraint of it.
Ripping it up and starting again.