photo by nate steiner

I got in late last night to Portland. DFW –> LAX –> PDX Of course, it was really late considering the 2 hour time difference it was REALLY late. 1:00 AM lPDT ate. (or 3:00 AM CDT late) But my body didn’t take that into account when it decided to wake up at 7:30 AM CDT (or 5:30 AM PDT). So I am off to the conference to get some coffee. Lots o’ coffee.

photo by wildcat dunny

I have come across a few useful sites the are helping to connect other Rails developers with each other. Some are specific to RailsConf while others are targeted at Rails developers.

RailsConf

• MyConfPlan - Plan which sessions you will be going to. Here’s my schedule.
• ConferenceMeetup - Meet up with others while at RailsConf. Want to me up with me?

Entrepreneurial

• Working With Rails - Find and recommend others who are working with Rails. You can see what I am doing and even recommend me if you want.
• Rails For All - Promoting Rails to the world. And helping freelance developers get their name out there.

photo by texas_mustang

One of the things I like about taking a project from start to finish is the first few rounds of development where we hammer out what the application is supposed to do. After reading Kathy Sierra’s article “Don’t Make the Demo Look Done“, I wanted to see if I could come up with something similar to the Napkin Look and Feel for my web applications.

Why is it important? I have found out the hard way, what Joel Spolsky points out in The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. As soon I start putting the colors, graphics, and drop shadows in place for the finished product, the attention is no longer on the functionality of the application and now turns to “could you move that button over 5 pixels?” And this is still while half the application remains unfinished!

So this is my interpretation of making the demo look like a demo. It is completely driven with a separate CSS stylesheet that can be removed and replaced with the finished stylesheet. I make use of the Yahoo CSS and some paper background images. I have even contemplated making use of the Tongue In Cheek icons to make it even more authentic. I would have used a handwriting font, but there is not a good cross browser way to deliver fonts, so Comic Sans will have to satisfy the prototype font requirement.

Here are what the initial screens look like for a new application:

• Home Page
• Sample Page
• Sample Page

Does it work?

So far it has worked great. And as soon as we switch stylesheets, we lose focus on the functionality. Every time. So I will keep using this and keep pushing this as far as a project will let me.

Because my friend Matt was so impressed with a Firefox extension I showed him, I thought I would share some of my other favorites.

photo by longhorndave

What Extensions I Am Using Right Now

• Web Developer Toolbar - Just about everything you could want to do HTML and CSS, plus I can edit AND save the CSS changes I was playing around with.
• Firebug - So much goodness. Especially debugging JavaScript and looking over AJAX requests and responses.
• View Source Chart - Makes looking at HTML source bearable.
• ColorZilla - a color picker for pulling colors off of web pages.
• HTMLValidator - because it is too easy to miss a closing tag somewhere that messes everything up.
• DummyLipsum - when you need some filler content.
• SeleniumIDE - great little utility for helping to write Selenium tests for functional testing.

photo by meshmar2

Not to mention

• Adblock - no more ads.
• Adblock Filterset.G - no more ads just got easier.
• GTDInbox - for when I think that I am Getting Things Done
• Foxmarks - because I have too many computers and too many bookmarks.

Got a favorite? I’d like to hear about it.

photo by zruvalcaba

After my last post, I thought I would share what I use for developing on Ubuntu.

Editor

I have always been a hands-on kinda guy, so I don’t use any of the fancy IDEs. Right now, I am using SciTE for two reasons. It feels lightweight and it is available for Linux and Windows. Since my laptop does not have a lot of memory, a lightweight editor is a must. I tried Eclipse, but it chewed up all my memory and slowed things to a crawl. So SciTE with some additional plugins (and information on getting them going) powers the development at McKinney Station.

Ruby and Rails

I am using the latest Ruby and Rails for all new development. For testing I am using RSpec, which seems a lot more intuitive to me. Other gems I have installed include:

• FasterCSV - parsing CSV files
• starfish - simple Ruby Map/Reduce
• mongrel - lightweight Ruby web server
• hpricot - Ruby HTML parser

Database

I love starting all of my development projects with SQLite. It is so easy to get up and running. As the project matures, I am able to quickly switch development over to a MySQL database with a change in the application’s database configuration and a quick rake db:migrate.

Version Control

All source code versioning is done with Subversion. With this quick little script, I can get a Rails project committed and started in minutes.

Conclusion

I am always looking for ways to speed up my development process, but so far this is working for me. And it is very enjoyable.

photo by ralph lehmann

Last week, my laptop started acting funny. Not that unusual since I run Ubuntu on my laptop. It’s not one of the super computers all my buddies have, but it does let me get the job done.

So last week when things finally got to a tipping point, I decided to try an upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release. Needless to say, it didn’t go as planned. With a planned trip coming up, I needed to get things back in order quickly. I made sure I had a current backup of my /home directory, and did a brand new install. Things went mostly well (remember this is a laptop) and within a day I was back up and going.

For my own reference later, these are the things I had to do to get Ubuntu working on my Averatec.

• Add boot setting to enable wired network.
• Download Broadcom 43xx drivers for wireless network.
• Use ndiswrapper and blacklist broadcom drivers (see last post by codyjack)
• Unlock the keyring automatically when logging in to quickly connect to wireless networks.
• Restore backup
• Get back to work

photo by monique72

With all of the talk these days of Web 2.0 and the fancy, shiny, draggable, refreshable, blinking, glowing components in web applications, I wonder how many of the will still work when JavaScript is turn off or not even present (yes, it still happens). And how is the usability and accessibility of the application affected when so much of the interaction happens through JavaScript that doesn’t degrade?

I have been taking a look at creating a fully functional application, without any fancy Javascipt or AJAX, and then adding the extra functionality unobtrusively. To force myself to learn how to do this, I stopped using Prototype, script.aculo.us, and the Ruby on Rails helpers with RJS, and I started using JQuery. Two things happened: 1. I started to better understand how AJAX works and can enhance my application. 2. I found out I really like JQuery.

More on my JQuery experiences later. Now back to adding cool features, unobtrusively.