and Twitter.
Also, in case there was any doubt, some of our favorite college towns across the US are Missoula, Montana (Go Grizzlies!), Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gainesville, Florida
Typetester is an online application used by web-designers to compare different fonts on-screen during the planning stages of a project. Extremely useful for those who don’t like to implement, then change, Typetester is a an extremely slick example of fine CSS and xHTML implementation and includes examples of almost every font bundled into the most popular operating systems for comparison.
Read more: Typetester
Website monitoring services are nothing new, but many do in fact suck to use. The last monitoring service we used went down more often than our server(s) and had so many false-positives that we ditched it and vowed to give up with third-party monitoring. Then we started using Montastic which provided an extremely simple interface allowing us to get up and running in around 20 seconds, with all of our servers reporting back green (as in go!). Montastic allows monitoring for up to 100 servers/domains as well as the ability to check server status via your personal RSS feed and your very own Yahoo widget.
Read more: Montastic – Free webserver monitoring
The Ruby on Rails overlords have released a security patch to address a “severe” security issue which warrants a very stern warning from the developers to upgrade. The upgrade is up to Rails 1.1.5 and patches a security hole which affects versions 1.1.0-1.1.4, versions 1.0 and earlier are not affected by the security issue.
Instruction for patching:
As always, the trick is to do “gem install rails†and then either changing config/environment.rb, if you’re bound to gems, or do “rake rails:freeze:gems†if you’re freezing gems in vendor.
Read more: Mandatory Rails security patch 1.1.5
For Mac nerds, nothing is holier than the WWDC, with all those new-fangled hardware and software announcements coming straight from Jobs himself. Yesterday, we had even more reason to be excited, or at least raise an eyebrow halfway, as the boys at 37signals announced that Ruby on Rails will be shipping with the next version of OS X. Server and client will be featured on the developer’s disk included with OS X Leopard! Rails has certainly been accepted within the Mac development community and that shows, with sources inside Apple reporting Ruby and Rails’ popularity growing rapidly within Apple. More great news for the RoR guys, which I’m sure is helping them keep it real.
Read more: Ruby on Rails shipping with OS X 10.5
Calcualating color combinations is the bane of my existence when I’m doing web development work. Although there are millions of various tools and color theory exercises, none that I’ve found are as useful as what I’ve found with the color tester tools at ColorCombos.com. Built to help web developers quickly choose and test their color combinations, the color tester allows users to easily see how different color combinations and text will interact on screen. Users are then able to save palette images (to easily work off of in Photoshop or Fireworks), submit their combinations to be included in the color gallery, share combos with other users and much more.
Read more: Color combinations tool
* – Edited to reflect my lack of knowledge of what a true programming language is ;)
As anyone involved in ‘web 2.0′ knows Ajax is one of the hottest web development techs around at the moment. For those looking into Ajax, there are many many tutorials and information on the web, but only one true site which collects and shares everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Ajax in web development. AjaxPatterns.org has quickly become one of the premier resources for the Ajax web developer, containing a collection of design patterns, code-samples, tips, and a wiki featuring articles on Ajax implementations and usage.
June 17th was Rails Day 2006, an annual event where teams create new and interesting web applications in just 24 hours, using the Ruby on Rails web application framework. Recently, John from Burm.net has posted an unofficial project page, listing short descriptions and URLs to each of the projects. While his list isn’t complete, some of the projects listed still stand-out as solid web applications, albeit a little rough around the edges. We’re suckers for the social coffee “tasting” project Cuppin, although why anyone would bother taste-testing Starbucks coffee is beyond me.
Can you imagine travelling to visit family, sitting down at their computer, starting up any web browser and having complete and secure access to your desktop, including your applications, messages and information? I sure can. Enter the idea of WebOS, a research project by various universities, which has resulted in the creation of EyeOS. EyeOS is an open-source web desktop environment, enabling the user to setup their own small (and easy) EyeOS server (a public server is also available) at home which they can then remotely connect to from virtually any internet-connected PC. Set it up with the many EyeApps available and the user is then able to easily and remotely access email, documents, files, photos, and much much more. This is known as the WebOS, a rich and powerful remote operating system available to the user from any location. Still a little rough around the edges, with a 1.0 release approaching, EyeOS is trying to simplify and revolutionize the way we interact with our data and the internet.
Object-oriented and open-source programming language, Ruby, is considered by some to have a part in revolutionizing web development (led by variant Ruby on Rails and subsequently AJAX on Rails). Created in 1993 by Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby is well-known for not only being extremely powerful, but also extremely easy and accessible to developers from all camps (especially fans of PERL, Smalltalk and maybe even Python). Those interested in giving Ruby a go should check out this short and sweet, 15 minute hands-on tutorial, all taking place within your web-browser of choice.
[Ruby hands-on tutorial | Ruby entry @ Wikipedia | Ruby on Rails]
September 8th in 