Matt / April 23, 2008, 9:42 am
From Khoi Vinh’s ongoing Q&A session:
Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we’ve created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.
The challenge is even more complex when you consider that, though each blog has its own needs, the vast majority must be based on a single template (within WordPress, our Web log publishing system) that manages all of the blogs together. As you can imagine, that requires that the template be very versatile and that our designers be very nimble.
So by virtue of the fact that we’re constantly launching new blogs, we’re also in a perpetual state of revision and refinement. We’re fine-tuning the typography, adding new features to the right-hand column, incorporating new kinds of media content into the articles, etc. All of which is work that may then be reflected back on the other blogs.
I find this really remarkable. I can’t help but wonder how difficult it was to get stakeholders to agree to the constraints of a single Wordpress template. By standardizing the blog creation process, they now have an agile publishing system that imposes creative constraints but has been able to grow rapidly with nytimes.com.
Imagine being the guy in charge of maintaining these blogs though.
Nathan / April 14, 2008, 4:12 pm
At the end of last week Phusion, a Netherlands based IT company, launched the Passenger gem, which acts as a mod_rails for Apache. Without going into the technical details, this is as close as Rails has come to having an ‘ftp files to the server and it works’ deployment method. With deployment being one of the steepest learning curves in the Rails world, this announcement could potentially be huge.
So what does this mean for developers who have been using Rails for several years and those who have yet to pick it up? Many Rails developers, who have seen the progression from CGI to FastCGI to Mongrel, Mongrel Cluster, Thin, etc, have been forced to learn a good amount about unix, apache, nginx, monitoring servers, watching processes, etc. Unix command line skills have gone hand in hand with Rails development up to this point. In fact, entire businesses such as Rails Machine, Engine Yard, Planet Argon, etc. are built around the fact that Rails is hard for the average person to deploy (not to mention great open source tools like capistrano, vlad and mongrel itself).
Is this the beginning of a new era for Rails where the last barrier to entry has been removed? It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this has on the current Rails community as real-world data becomes available.
Nathan / April 14, 2008, 3:48 pm
I spent most of this past weekend working through Michael J. Mangino’s book “Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails“(DFPAWR) from the Pragmatic Programmers. I’ve been interested in the facebook platform for awhile but the resources have mostly fallen into two categories: 1) Overly simple Hello World programs in PHP or 2) Exhaustive api references.
DFPAWR, which is still in Beta, walks the reader through creating a full application from start to finish using Chad Fowler’s excellent Facebooker library for Rails. While this is definietly a Rails-centric book, the author provides the underlying FBML code first and then explains how to achieve the same effect using the simplified syntax of the Facebooker library.
It should be noted that the book assumes a strong understanding of the Rails framework. However, this assumption is one of the book’s biggest strengths. DFPAWR is a perfect example of how fast author and reader can hit the ground running when they already speak the same language. Michael Mangino clearly knows his subject matter and readily points out many of the common pitfalls, security concerns, and Facebook terms of use issues (i.e. you can’t store a username in a local database) that those new to the platform would have to stumble through themselves.
It’s a great resource for Rails developers looking to get started on Facebook apps, and with mod_rails on the way it’s never been easier.
Matt / April 14, 2008, 12:23 pm
This year’s IA Summit just wrapped up in Miami and as usual there are several sets of slides that made me wish I had gone. Not surprisingly, I was drawn to Leah Buley’s presentation “How to be a UX team of one.”
A bunch of others look really interesting too, and relevant to others outside of the IA/UX practice:
Caleb / April 7, 2008, 5:31 pm
While perusing the ever important osflash.org in preparation for some upcoming flash work, I came across some really great open source flash projects I thought might be interesting to some.
- movie masher
Facilitates easy navigation of video, audio and image assets as well as effects, transitions and themes. Media can simply be dragged into the timeline for inclusion in a mash.
- swf address
A small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax
- ajax animator
Ajax Animator is a free open source web based flash ide designed for simplicity and community effort.
The only issue I have with osflash is that a lot of the projects are out-dated and not removed or tagged as being so, and it can become difficult to figure out if it is still applicable.
Caleb / April 4, 2008, 8:50 am
Recently it has been in the press that Apple has said they will not put the Flashplayer onto the iPod touch or the iPhone because they say the lite version isn’t good enough for the iPhone. Adobe then said they were going to make a player anyways using the newly released SDK, but quickly realized they couldn’t due to the extreme limitations of the SDK (more here).
At any rate, as the flash guy around here, I was not particularly surprised or thrilled at this news. On further reflection though, I realized the truth – what I am now calling the “Apple Flash Conspiracy.” There have been rumors of Netflix using the newest version of the Flashplayer (which supposedly has DRM capability built in) to start streaming their movies on Apple computers. Apple, now in the movie renting business, stands to lose potential business by allowing this to happen. If I can already watch movies using a subscription I’m already paying for, why rent from iTunes? If they can prevent it from happening on the iPod and iPhone, the better for them.
I realize this is most likely not what is happening, but it’s still something to think about.
Iain / April 3, 2008, 8:31 am
An excellent review of Outside, billed as the the first massively multiplayer game.
The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.
