Rails Day Winners Announced
Speaking of YubNub - the winners of the Rails Day competition have been anounced. Surprisingly, YubNub is not the winner and instead came in second place. The winning application appears to be a billing webapp, and the third place winner is a sort of distributed volunteering / to-do list site.The Social Command Line
As a result of the "Rails Day":http://railsday.com/blog/ competition, a very interesting entry has popped up and has been making the rounds. The site is called "YubNub":http://www.yubnub.org/ and it bills itself as 'a (social) command line for the web'. The idea behind it is very simple - turn common web sites into command line "applications" by allowing the users to create a command as a sort of shorthand for invoking the page's internal functions. The problem _was_ that the original impementation was a little too simplistic to do a number of things. Users can create "commands" by sticking in an url and including a variable where the command's arguments would be stuck. The original implementation only accepted a single parameter that could be inserted into the url. However, I just checked back and it's now able to taked named parameters via a "switch" syntax. E.g. bq. xe -amount 100 -from USD -to EUR I'm curious how "Jonathan":http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/ will be able to implement pipes on the service. In many cases the answer is embedded in some generated html file. It would seem that the commands would need to be modified to allow for a custom html parser to extract the answer out (for the next command's input) typically beyond the abilities of the common user and prone to breaking far too often since it's really just screen-scraping. But then, I never thought of the idea of making a generic command line interface for webpages...Web Design for Dummies
I recently stumbled across a few pages that are handy for choosing and designing websites in terms of color schemes.
First up is the Web Color Schemes from Return of Design. Nothing too fancy, but it has a set of color schemes that a beginning designer can pick up and use without too much thought. Not exactly rocket science…
But, when you combine these color schemes with the new Stock Repository Experimental Colr Pickr you should be able to find yourself some flickr pictures by color roughly. It’s almost a beginner’s website on a box!
Welcome to the blog!
I think the title is fitting, seeing as how I appear to be the last North American programmer left to start a blog.
While I’m at it, does anyone have a gmail invite?
[Editor’s note: It’s a joke.]
[Editor’s note #2: Although I say it’s a joke, I’m really that uncool – I only got an invite 3 days ago.]