Feedmarker Blog

Me too. I spent over an hour last night looking through discussion forums, tutorials, and documentation. Then I struggled with command line installs (command line is like heiroglyphics to me) and editing config files. Finally I gave up.This morning I tried Locomotive, and it worked so well I almost cried. It’s insanely easy to install [...]

Couldn’t agree more with this post over at Signal vs. Noise arguing that enterprise software is going the way of the dodo.The reason is simple: it doesn’t work. Most of the time, software touted as being for the enterprise isn’t really useful for most employees. I talked to a friend the other day who works [...]

Check out this form I ran across today at eBay:Which button do you click? You should click “Cancel Bid” since that’s what you’re trying to do, but my tendency is not to click a button called “Cancel” when I’m trying to submit a form.So I automatically clicked the other button (thinking, “If it’s not the [...]

One of the best things about Firefox is the ability to add useful extensions. These are little applications you download and install as supplements to the browser’s built-in capabilities. The great thing is that there’s a thriving community of people out there developing really useful extensions.

Here are the Firefox addons I use most:

Web Developer extension, [...]

Prolonged downtime over at del.icio.us yesterday made me think it’d be a good idea to revisit some load testing resources for Ruby on Rails applications:

httperf—http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/ My personal favorite since it’s the only one that gives detailed statistics of request, response, connection, transfers, etc. and even separates the headers from the body to spot additional problems. [...]

This came in handy earlier today when I was fixing a bug on one of my apps.If you need to restart your Rails application, but you don’t have SSH access, you can do it by
changing the following line in your dispatch.cgi (or dispatch.fcgi, depending on which you use) file:Change:
RailsFCGIHandler.process!

to

RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 1
This tells Rails to run [...]

Check out Peter Cooper’s new app: Congress. It’s a Ruby on Rails + AJAX powered live chat application that he coded in about three hours (wow!).

He’s also got an example of embedding the chat app in a page! I think that’d be a really easy way to add live chat support to you web site.
[...]

A nice mention of Teacher! on the Ajaxian weblog today. I’m happy to be getting feedback on the application, I’m already seeing places where it can improve.If you haven’t tried Teacher! yet, check it out.

Check this interview I did with Emily Chang of eHub on how and why I built Feedmarker. It’s like behind the music, but for geeks.And here’s a new thing I’ve been working on: Teacher!

Since I’ve learned so much from looking at code other people have graciously put out there, I thought it’d be nice to let other people have a look at the code behind two of my projects; Walker! and Notetagger. Walker! is an application that allows you to create, annotate, save and share Google Maps. Notetagger [...]