Code

Mapping out how to build a Rails Configuration gem to handle all the cases you'll ever need.

Disqus is a great plug-n-chug commenting system, but it's lacking a few very useful features: Markdown support, syntax highlighting the comments, and callbacks to tell you when a comment has been added or edited. And getting the comment/reaction count for the current page or linked posts is overly complicated and/or not-well-documented. This plugin hopefully simplifies the Disqus installation process while adding several helpful features.

A simple jQuery plugin to get albums and images from Picasa without the need for PHP, Ruby, or any other server side language. Makes it easy to create a simple, dynamic, free, client-side-only image gallery.

Delayed::Job and Resque are excellent ruby gems, but they require substantial funds and/or time to setup on Heroku or Slicehost. High cost/effort prevents bootstrapped startups from building apps that need background processing, like aggregators. So I've hacked together a template Sinatra app that uses GAE to give you free Cron and Task-Queue functionality on Heroku.

The instance_eval method is probably the coolest thing about ruby. Good use of instance_eval is what makes a framework a good framework in my opinion. Learn how to use it for your next gem.

Ruby and Rails were both Disruptive Innovations, in part by adhering to Convention over Configuration. Rubygems were like that too. But we're starting to follow Java's footsteps. Rubygems are becoming too configurable. This dramatically increases the barrier to entry and slows down innovation. Here are some ways to kill that barrier.

Sometimes you just want to make your page as SEO'ed as possible but can't find or remember all the meta tags. This is a complete and up-to-date list with all the meta tags and link tags I've found on the internet over the years. If you have others, let me know.

There is not much information out there yet describing how to create a fully-featured layout using the entire set of new HTML5 tags. This post shows how to structure a rich Blog Post using most of the HTML5 tags with tips on how to make your DOM extremely semantic.

There are 100's of Social Bookmarking sites out there, and most of them don't have API's. This RubyGem builds a simple API over the more popular social bookmarking services to automate publishing. It definitely streamlines the workflow.

Sometimes it just makes more sense to automate things. If you're going to be writing a lot, might as well make it easy.

Imgur is a great service to host images. It's free, simple, and it gives you neat analytics. The only problem is, the Imgur interface uses cookies to associate images with a user, but the API does not. This shows you how to make the API work the same.

Feeds are one of the most important parts of publicizing and marketing your site. But if you're building a site from scratch, knowing everything a feed should include is a lot to grasp. This outlines everything for you.

If you write multiple blog posts a day, it's a big waste of time to go to each of the N number of publishing services out there and fill out all of their forms. This shows you how to programmatically submit to Mixx, even fill out a captcha programmatically. You could easily extend this to creating a publishing API to other services like DZone.

Every time we start a new project, we need a lot of the same Javascript and CSS. When we go live, all of those assets need to be minified and gzipped in order to decrease page load times by as much as 70%. That's a lot of work. Now, using Github Pages, you can solve this asset problem well once and know for certain you'll have maximum up-time and minimal load time.

Creating sub-domains and remembering the format of CNAME vs. A DNS records takes a while. This describes exactly how to setup Google Apps sub-domains using Github Pages.

When you first stumble upon Google Forms, you're stoked. But you quickly hit a wall because of the lack of a programmatic API. This shows how to scrape a JSON tree from a Google Form's HTML.

Using Zerigo to make your life easier in customizing a domain for Github Pages.