Enhance your site search with OpenSearch

Published: February 15th, 2010

If your web site provides its own search function, set up OpenSearch to let your users search from the browser search box. Read More »

CSS Metaframeworks – King of all @media

Published: February 10th, 2010

I had the opportunity to give a presentation on CSS Metaframeworks at Dallas.rb last week. We discussed CSS, Sass, Compass, LessCSS, xCSS, Blueprint, and 960.gs. Here are the video and slides.
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Sneak peek: tail -f thechangelog

Published: January 21st, 2010

I wanted to give you my readers (all five of you) a sneak peek at a little something Adam and I have been working on over at The Changelog.
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Quick tip: Use APIdock to hunt down missing methods

Published: December 22nd, 2009

From time to time, we all to have step into older projects and add features. Suddenly that old standby method you’d come to love is giving you a method_missing. How do you go about finding out which version of Rails introduced it so you can upgrade or monkey patch? APIdock has your back.
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The Twitter gem now supports Tumblr

Published: December 18th, 2009

On the heels of the announcement that Tumblr now supports the Twitter API, we’re happy to say the Twitter gem now supports Tumblr!
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Use JavaScript to put GitHub info on your site

Published: December 15th, 2009

In case you missed it, Adam and I launched a new blog and are six episodes into a new podcast where we bring you what’s fresh and new in open source software. Our goal is to scour the depths of GitHub (and other sources) to highlight the cool new and newly released open source projects. As the good folks at Github recently highlighted, one of my favorite features of the blog is the GitHub integration. Here’s how to use JavaScript to put GitHub info on your site.
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Speed up your API development, sniff your network calls on OSX with HTTPScoop

Published: December 7th, 2009

HTTPScoop from Tuffcode is a neat way to see what network calls are going on from all the applications in OS X. It’s perfect for debugging API calls or creating fixtures for API wrapper tests.
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Add a retweet button to your Rails app easily with the Backtweets helper

Published: December 2nd, 2009

On this blog, I use the excellent Socialize plugin to easily add social sharing buttons to each post. For Twitter, I chose to configure Socialize to use Backtweets for displaying tweet counts mainly because it’s more configurable than the TweetMeme widget.

When I needed a Backtweets widget for a client Rails application, I whipped up a quick plugin that provides an easy helper for writing all those JavaScript options.
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Link LinkedIn into your next Ruby application

Published: November 29th, 2009

LinkedIn launched its new API last week, allowing any developer brave enough to implement OAuth to integrate with one of the largest social networks around. Seeking an opportunity to really understand OAuth more fully and play around with the LinkedIn API at the same time, I created the LinkedIn Ruby Gem.
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Rubyists I’m thankful for this year

Published: November 25th, 2009

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I also like what’s become a blogging trend of stopping and giving thanks for a few things. This year, I focus on some Rubyists that I feel don’t get enough praise for the great work they do.
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