Featured Post

Pragmatic Studio: Rails Studio Graduate!
By thingles on Mar 15, 2008 in Featured, Ruby on Rails | comments(1)

rails-alumni-button.pngI graduated! Or, well, at least I got the certificate!

I finally took the plunge this week and took Rails Studio after thinking about it many times. I blogged a day-by-day account — day 1, day 2, day 3. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve coded anything significant and I’m hoping to get a bit closer to it in some projects coming up. This class was my plunge into Rails.

While I’ve been away from the keys for a while, I’ve been very familiar with a number of frameworks and have personally seen teams struggle and thrive in different frameworks. I’ve really taken note of the “weight” of a framework and the effect it has on a programming team. Something that I think is far too often ignored. We focus on scale, “enterprise readiness” (another topic to post about) and forget that at the end of the day a bunch of developers have to live inside this thing — and it needs to be nice and hopefully fun.

Now that the class is over, some thoughts.

About this Site

This is the short part of the about.

Most Discussed Posts

  1. Power WordPress Presentation Materials (6)
  2. Solving Offsite Backups (2)
  3. Publisher Party at Hearst Tower (2)
  4. Power WordPress Session at Minnebar (2)
  5. Registered for RailsConf 2008 (1)

Themes: The Worst of the WordPress Ecosystem

By thingles on May 13, 2008 in Blogging | comments(0)

This is frustrating.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to find a new WordPress theme for Tammy’s blog, Smaller Than a Redwood. This is so frustrating.

First, she can’t do it herself easily because the look of a theme is completely unpredictable of its functionality. I would argue that a theme that doesn’t support sidebar widgets and tags right out of the box, should just be deleted. Why do we still have this junk floating around the Internet?

Worse still is the volume of themes that are just purely broken. We found a theme and I started to “fix” it, meaning add tagging support, and then found out several of the themes own images were not in the download and cannot be found on the Internet.

Argh! Now, back to Google to try to sift through thousands of piles of crap and see if I can find a workable theme.

Tags: , ,

Power WordPress Presentation Materials

By thingles on May 10, 2008 in Internet | comments(6)

I’m doing my Power WordPress presentation at Minnebar today. I decided to do the presentation today without any slides but instead give everyone handouts with the relevant tips & tricks. To share the wealth here are links to the PDF files for the three sections I’m covering, Performance, Plugin Review and SEO Basics.

Tags: ,

Power WordPress Session at Minnebar

By thingles on May 5, 2008 in Blogging | comments(2)

Minnebar is approaching this weekend, May 10th! I’m really excited and I just couldn’t stand to not be presenting this year so I decided to put my name up and do a session on Power WordPress usage. I plan to hit on must-have plugins that can save you a ton of time as well as some great SEO tactics for driving more traffic to your site. It should be a lot of fun!

I also hope to get some feedback and talk a bit about doing a WordCamp in the fall.

Tags: , ,

Minneapolis Getting Comcast Love

By thingles on Apr 13, 2008 in Internet | comments(0)

logo.gifThis rolled by in my newsfeed a few days ago and caught my eye. The New York Times had a short piece on Minneapolis getting some new high-speed options from Comcast. I found the release on Comcast’s website about it as well.

Comcast is rolling out this new DOCSIS 3.0 technology and it promises to give us 50 megabit download speeds. That’s a whopping 10x on what I get now on a regular basis. The service is about 2.5x as expensive as well, but I’d seriously consider the upgrade.

I checked out my service area and this isn’t an option for me yet. Does anyone see this as an option yet? Supposedly it’s available now.

Tags: , ,

TED - Podcast You Should Be Watching

By thingles on Apr 13, 2008 in Internet | comments(0)

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. TED has an annual conference that in recent years has become a pretty amazing event. Getting into TED is not easy. On top of a very expensive entry fee, you actually have to write an essay expanding on your accomplishments and what you expect to achieve in the coming years.

Fortunately for everyone, TED has also opened up in a very big way. The TED website is pretty amazing and has videos of hundreds, if not thousands, of TED presentations. You should add this to your list of sites to watch and check out. The podcast for TED and my iPhone are musts for me.

Here is a collection of three amazing videos released this year from the TED conference. I watched them in this order, in a row, and that is why I wrote this post. I just felt more people should see this great stuff. It makes you think.
Read the full article

Tags: , , , , ,

Sign up for 2008 Minnebar

By thingles on Apr 4, 2008 in Announcement | comments(0)

Registration just opened up for the 2008 edition of Minnebar! Get your self over to the wiki and put your name on the list. It’s been great every year, and there is no reason to believe this year wont be even better.

minnebar-logo.png
Tags: ,

How Software Is Built Interview

By thingles on Apr 2, 2008 in Internet | comments(1)

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to do a phone interview with Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell who are doing a series of interviews regarding How Software Is Built. The interview was a lot of fun and really hit around the general theme of how open source is changing the way software is created.

how-software-is-built-interview-jamie-thingelstad.gif

It is long, but I think it came out pretty well.

Tags: , ,

FriendFeed Duplication via Mashing

By thingles on Mar 25, 2008 in Internet | comments(1)

I’ve been working with financial news for years now and there is a really common problem in financial news, deduplication. The issue is when several news outlets will cover the same story or even redistribute another sources story, creating duplicates that readers find annoying. As the web becomes more mashable, I saw the first sign of this same problem on FriendFeed today.

One of the people I follow had both Twitter and Tumblr feeding into his FriendFeed. But, he also had Twitter feeding Tumblr. In flowed the dups!

FriendFeed-Duplication.gif

He removed the Twitter to Tumblr feed to stop this, but it was a glimpse of a feature that FriendFeed is going to need to consider. In this instance, deduplication would be pretty easy since the content is exactly the same.

Tags: , , ,

More FriendFeed Fun

By thingles on Mar 25, 2008 in Internet | comments(0)

I wrote earlier about FriendFeed and I’m continuing to really enjoy it. I’ve played in the past with aggregation and this is by far the best solution for “life streaming” out there yet. Here is the perfect example of why FriendFeed is cool.

Magnetix-and-Mazie-FriendFeed.png

The Twitter and Flickr actions tied together; open and mashable in a “Web 2.0″ way. Very cool.

Tags: , , ,

Publisher Party at Hearst Tower

By thingles on Mar 18, 2008 in Internet | comments(2)

I got a fun opportunity to attend a really nice event hosted by True Ventures, Automattic, Sphere, New York Times and Hearst Interactive at the Hearst Tower. It was a collection of who’s who in the publishing/media sector and some great companies with some innovative web stuff. Big thanks to Raanan over at Automattic for thinking of me. Two fanboy moments of chatting with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and Lindsay Campbell formerly of Wall Strip and now at MobLogic.tv.

Jason Calacanis Interviewing Toni Schneider of WordPress on his mobile phone.
Jason Calacanis Mobile Interview

Matt Mullenweg
Matt from WordPress

The Crowd Listening to a Short Background on the Event
Hearst Intro

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Previous Entries