I am all about community and people participating in a community. Its the way social media succeeds. But there are non-social media communities out there too (yes I know that’s shocking). I was recently asked to participate in a beta testing for Peer Tester. I think this is an absolutely fantastic idea. Developers helping other …
By eric
The best way to rethink things is to be in the shoes of your users. Use your app how they use your app. Try to take a fresh look at your application like you’ve never seen it before. Would you change the location of the menu/navigation? Would you change the actual menus/navigation? Would you add …
By eric
When you are using a framework, they typically set your VARCHAR size automatically to 255. This is normally fine since you are letting the framework abstract you away from most of the SQL. But if you interact with your SQL, there is a way to get a decent speed increase on your SELECTs and ORDER …
By eric
Although one of the primary ideas behind frameworks is to keep things as simple as possible, sometimes they create issues in the long run. What I am about to discuss is something of a luxury problem (as scaling usually is), but it is a problem nonetheless. When initially starting a project, whether you are using …
By eric
My editor of choice for most of what I do on the Mac (when I’m not in the shell using Vim) is Textmate. I recently came across a neat plugin called the Textmate Minimap. Essentially this plugin opens a map across the side of your Textmate window (like another drawer on the other side) and …
By eric
Having spent a lot of time in the Perl world and even trying to write a Perl poem here and there, I decided to give some Python poetry a try. It turned out to be a bit more philosophical than poetic. But it compiles and that’s what counts; even though it doesn’t do anything useful …
By eric
Although SortFix has been around for a while, I hadn’t heard of it until recently. I also didn’t really have a reason to give it a try because the vast majority of my Google searches were providing me with the results I was looking for. The idea here is that you can do a normal …
By eric
There always seems to be something affecting your SEO rankings. Most recently, people have had issues with personalized search. Another kink in the chain may be social search. The first thing is that Social Search can’t replace Hyptertext search (such as Google/Yahoo!/Bing/etc). Social search has 3 inherent drawbacks, time to receive information, credibility of the …
By eric
Having recently implemented Thinking Sphinx on one of my web sites, I thought it would be cool to be able to search every indexed model. With Thinking Sphinx, it’s easy to have a bunch of different classes returned in the results. The tougher part is displaying them in a way that is organized (although admittedly …
By eric
When dealing with content syndication, one is occasionally in the situation where you are not the higher ranking site in search engines. You might rank #4 for an article and in that same search, your syndicated content may be ranked #1. What’s the best way to deal with this? After much reading and discussion, I …
By eric
