Starring Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship, yet somehow it’s still about five minutes too long.
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What makes Ruby so great?
Nathan / December 19, 2007, 2:37 pm
Things you take for granted after using Ruby for awhile:
#This works: topic.posts.length > 0 #The Ruby way: topic.posts.any? #This works: topic.posts[topic.posts.length-1] #The Ruby way: topic.posts.last #This works: if!((foo != nil)&&(foo != '')) #The Ruby way: unless foo.blank?
Other nice things that I don’t care to come up with the harder version by hand for:
5.days.from_now 5.days.ago
note: day.* and .blank? only works in rails, not ruby out the box
“What happens when the $100 laptop actually gets used?”
Matt / December 18, 2007, 9:24 am
This blog post has some thought-provoking (but unfavorable) commentary about the design process behind the laptop and links to more favorable reviews of the device itself. For example, this one from the BBC which claims “the children [in a Nigerian pilot study] – most of whom had never seen a computer before March – have clearly embraced the green and white machines.”
Fantastic Fixes Help Your Sad, Pathetic Cubicle
Danielle / December 14, 2007, 10:23 am
In light of our office move today, I thought I’d share these tips for spicing up your workspace. I’m partial to the Irish Pub cubicle myself.
Getting people to contribute
Matt / December 14, 2007, 10:04 am
By now, you’ve probably read about Knol, Google’s attempt to create a database of high quality user-generated content similar to Wikipedia. Community and collaborative systems fail if users see no incentive to contribute, which is why Knol is so interesting. Google obviously thought hard about this and came up with two key incentives to people to contribute that Wikipedia does not offer:
- Google will clearly highlight the author of the article
- Google shares ad revenues with the author of a knol
Check out the screenshot of a knol entry on insomnia. Incentives for use are one of the most important things to consider when building a collaborative application. It will be interesting to see whether Google hit the sweet spot.
Google Zeitgeist 2007
Iain / December 13, 2007, 5:58 pm
The yearly Google Zeitgeist is always a great read (in a dorky sort of way).
David Byrne On The NY Times
Iain / December 11, 2007, 6:22 pm
Posts like this are one of the reasons David Byrne is one of my favorite bloggers.
Metrics for non-ecommerce websites
Matt / December 10, 2007, 10:31 am
7 minute overview of how to get actionable metrics for non-ecommerce sites. In other words, how do you measure success when you don’t sell anything?
Summary:
- Look at distributions, not averages. Averages lie.
- Three pieces of data are particularly valuable on non-ecommerce websites: time spent on site, visitor recency (when was the last time a visitor visited the site), and depth of visit (how many pages did the visitor consume?)
- Focus on the distributions of data for all three of these metrics. Averages lie.
There are plenty more short Google Analytics videos like this one at the appropriately titled Ultimate Google Analytics Video Roundup.