So, how has Twitter replaced my reader?

1. I subscribe to people, not sites

   Subscribing to a site via RSS means that you subscribe to all of the content on that feed. With Twitter, you subscribe to people. The users you follow will (hopefully) weed out articles that are not interesting, so you don’t need to. If they don’t or if they have too much noise, then you can simply unsubscribe. Many RSS readers added “following” other users later, but by then it was too late.

   Also, with only 140 characters, people get to the point about where the link goes. That makes it easy to ignore links that don’t sound interesting.

2. I get direct recommendations

   People I follow tweet a link to an article. This is the simplest and easiest way to read interesting articles since I’m already following people I find interesting.

3. I also get indirect recommendations

   People I follow retweet (RT) a post, from someone I don’t follow, that contains a link to an article. It seems like the volume of RTs has increased over the last 6 months; people are sharing more. This could be due to the ease with which the Twitter interface and mobile app allow RTs. This also gives me a chance to discover new, interesting people that I might want to follow.

4. I can randomly discover articles

   I have several saved searches and lists that I check periodically. A majority of people I see on there are not people I follow. When I check these, I often discover content that I would have missed otherwise.

   Combine that with straight up search and managing multiple accounts and I find random stuff all the time.

5. I can bookmark an article

   I don’t always have time to read a link right away, so I use the favorite feature as a way to bookmark a tweet until I have time to come back and read it. If you look at my favorites, they are overwhelmingly tweets containing a link.

6. I can share easily

   If I write something or find something that’s interesting, I’m likely to tweet/RT it. Twitter made it easy for sites to embed a share button, too. People can easily (un)follow me if it’s (un)interesting.

When I look at the current feature set of my RSS reader, it does the same things I described above, but checking it has constantly felt like a chore. I’ve already worked Twitter into my daily routine for communication, so there isn’t another site I need to log into to find articles. Additionally, I also don’t need to manage 2 sets of people I’m following.

Truthfully, I can’t think of a reason to keep using an RSS reader. Can you?

Update: Found these links from Business Insider: Twitter Has Killed RSS Readers and PaidContent.org: The Death Of The RSS Reader.

However, as we pass the 18 month mark of organizing this weekly event for entrepreneurs, I felt that I’d like to do more with the group. What I’d really like is for the conversations and information sharing we’re doing at the weekly event to continue online. So, thanks to some prodding from Marc Chung, I threw together a site¹ so that entrepreneurs in Phoenix can ask questions, submit posts and keep up on the latest news and events².

It’s intended to be a community site, so feel free to ask questions about small business, entrepreneurship, investment, technology or whatever else you can think of and we’ll do our best to answer them. Additionally, the community can submit posts that will appear on the site (after moderation). The posts can be text, video, images, audio, etc., which is pretty cool. I think there are other things that we could add to it, but I’d like to get some feedback first.

So, without further ado, go check it out the new Phoenix OpenCoffee Club website and let me know your thoughts!

1. I researched various options and settled on Tumblr as the platform because it provides all of the functionality I was looking for and is extremely easy to use. I also don’t need to host it myself…
2. We’re still using and promoting scheduling events through Eventification. I even added a small bit of JavaScript that pulls the latest OpenCoffee Club event from the Eventification API and prominently displays it in the header. I’m also working on creating a series of event distribution widgets for Eventification.

SunnyConf is a single-track, one day conference taking place Sept. 25th in Phoenix. There will be 8 speakers and a keynote, as well as lightning talks. There will also be time after the conference set aside for hacking. We’ve managed to pull together a great group of rubyists to share their knowledge. The speakers include:

• Jeremy Ashkenas (Keynote)
• Les Hill & Jim Remsik of HashRocket
• Charles Nutter
• Blake Mizerany
• and more!

You can find all of the date, time and location information in the widget to the right. You can also visit the official SunnyConf website or just jump straight over to Eventbrite to register for SunnyConf.

Late September is a great time to visit Phoenix! If you live nearby (e.g., Southern California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, etc.) then we’re only a short drive, and an even shorter flight, away. If you’re outside of that area, we have a major international airport, and plane tickets should be pretty cheap

I encourage you to come out to Arizona in September to learn, hack and meet other rubyists. I hope to see you at the conference!

Now, try executing the following in IE:

What would you expect to be the value of link.innerHTML? Turns out that it is the same as the href value, ‘http://flatterline.com’. It seems that, on IE only, if the inner HTML of an anchor tag looks like a URL, then upon replacing the href, it will also replace the inner HTML. Try the same experiment, but with link text that does not look like a URL:

Inspecting the innerHTML value will show that it was not replaced.

This is a browser level quirk, so using a JavaScript library won’t save from this unless your library has specifically made a special case for this. I originally saw this when using jQuery and thought it might be a problem with the jQuery framework.

I think the best workaround here is that when modifying an anchor tag with JavaScript, set attributes first, then set the link text.

What do you think? Have a different workaround or solution?

I was able to track it down to the use of position: relative on these particular elements. If I added position: relative to other elements, they would also appear to be fixed. I proceed to try relative positioning on surrounding elements, but it was only at the body level that all elements behaved as they should.

Armed with these clues, I was able to find a post by Emil Stenström that documented the existence of this bug in IE6 and IE7 beta 2. He has a great explanation about how to recreate it. His suggestion was to add relative positioning to the body tag, but the real problem, as he explained, was the use of auto margin to center the body element.

Seeing as how this was an embeddable widget, I didn’t really want to have the widget affect any elements outside of itself. So I opted to advise the embedding page to add a centered div around their content and remove the centering on the body tag. This corrected the problem and, once again, all was right in the world.

Or was it?

Essentially, with honeypot captchas you add fields into public facing forms that you expect to not be filled in, then you hide them through CSS (or other means). Since spam bots don’t usually apply CSS styles, the fields are visible to them, yet styled away for normal users. And we all know how spam bots love to fill in whatever fields they find… When the form is submitted, you simply check for these honeypot captcha fields to have values. If they do, then you stop processing the request and return as if everything completed a-okay.

I used this technique on a site several years ago and meant to package it into a gem. This weekend, I finally checked that off my todo list! Now, I’d like your feedback on whether this is useful and what I can do to make it better. Feel free to fork the repository and mess with the code. If you add a feature, please send me a pull request. Thanks!

You can find the repository here: Honeypot Captcha on Github.

References

• Honeypot Captcha by Phil Haack
• Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots

Company.find(:first, :conditions => [
  "state = :state AND name = :name AND division = :division AND created_at > :some_date",
  { :state => :approved, :name => 'Flatterline', :division => 'First', :some_date => '2009-02-27' }
])

This is also very handy when you have the same value for multiple parameters, since it will replace all matching bind variables with the value (e.g., the current time).

Event.find(:first, :conditions => [
  "state = :state AND starts_at <= :now AND ends_at >= :now",
  { :state => :active, :now => Time.zone.now }
])

References

• ActiveRecord::Base API documentation

So now, you can indicate which scenarios should pass and which are still be worked on, then run them separately if you like. Simply add some meta-data to your scenarios like this:

This will tag the scenario as a test that should work. If you have a work-in-progress, simply tag with @wip.

Read about some other ridiculously awesome cucumber and webrat features on the thoughtbot blog.

Strangely, though, Rails does not have an inflection that deals with the singularization of these words correctly. From the command line, try singularizing the word “business”:

While this seems like a contrived situation, it’s actually not as hard to hit as you’d think (e.g., common code that needs to singularize the incoming argument). I saw this while using Acl9, a role-based authorization system for Rails…

Here’s a quick fix that you can add to your config/initializers/inflections.rb:

You can read more about how this won’t be fixed in this ticket.