December 2009
8 posts
5 tags
Announcing Appsta 1.1.0
Worked a bit on tidying Appsta up this evening, and made a few decisions that will hopefully make it a bit more useful, and also hopefully get a few more people interested in using and contributing to it!
Appsta is at its core a library of helper methods for use in Rails templates, to help you build useful Rails app creation scripts that can cut down the amount of time it takes for you to get a...
4 tags
Getting started with Rails 2.3.5
This is a tutorial guided towards those who are new to Rails, or those who have not used it since v1.x and who might want a newbie-style refresher. I’ll be working my way through to some more advanced and interesting topics soon, so for those of you who know all of this already, please stay tuned!
I’ve now been using Ruby on Rails for almost four years, and have seen it progress from...
5 tags
Delicious irony, and MongoDB
So I guess it would stand to reason that a day after blogging about how awesome my new blog routine is, and how it helps me to post every day now, I get busy enough not to find time to really polish the draft I have going at the minute. Not wanting to lose my streak (just), I figured I’d at least try to post something useful today, even if it’s just a link to someone else.
This...
1 tag
Blogging, and sticking to it
As some of you may have noticed - I’ve been blogging a lot more in the last few days. This is me attempting to start a New Years resolution early, and that’s to try and publish a new post everyday.
However, I always found writing a new post from scratch, checking it twice, proof reading it and publishing it all in one day very daunting. Two different things have helped me with this.
...
4 tags
The paradoxical web application hypothesis
It suddenly dawned on me that something interesting, and in some ways very paradoxical, is occurring with current application trends. Over the last few years, there has been a marked movement towards rich user experiences in web applications - more and more web apps are using Flash and/or AJAX as well as other modern concepts to really make web sites behave and feel truly like first class...
4 tags
Understanding Management
I recently embarked on an openings course with the Open University, with a view to it being the first step for me on the way to a distance learning business degree. The openings course is mainly designed to get you into a studying frame of mind, and is perfect for someone like me who is returning to studying after six years. However, as the choices for the two openings courses on the way to a...
4 tags
Agile and Scrum'd
I’ve been meaning to write this up for almost two weeks now, but there is no time like the present! A couple of weeks ago Robert Dempsey, CEO and founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions took some time out of his busy schedule to speak to me about agile, and specifically agile from a freelancers point of view.
We had a great chat and covered a number of different things, but it was very cool...
6 tags
Advanced Tumblr Customization
As I hinted in my last post, I wanted to outline a few tips and tricks I used to customize this site pretty heavily when getting it up and running on Tumblr.
The documentation for building custom themes is pretty comprehensive, and covers the majority of things you’d want to do when building a customized site. I won’t rehash it here, needless to say it’s a relatively...