I built Hitgeist using Merb, a Ruby framework which brings fun back into web development. In fact, the fun is taken by Symfony, which just doesn’t feel elegant anymore. Merb also has less magic than Ruby on Rails, and is a lot better architected. In fact RoR developers liked Merb so much they started to unify both frameworks.

So, what are the updates?

First, I rewrote all templates from ERB to HAML. I should have done this before. Code becomes so much cleaner—tags are closed automatically, and visual clutter is reduced:

ERB (before, 9 lines)

<div id="container">
  <div id="sitemap">
    <span class="letters">
      <% ('A' .. 'Z').each do |letter| %>
        <a href="/trends/<%=letter%>"><%=letter%></a>
      <% end %>
    </span>
  </div>
</div>

HAML (after, 5 lines)

#container
  #sitemap
    %span.letters
      - ('A' .. 'Z').each do |letter|
        %a{ :href => '/trends/' + letter }>= letter

Second, I changed site structure to use grid system, a method to construct visually appealing page layouts using columns and rows which was used in newspapers for decades, but started getting its way to web only around 2005. Usually grids are implemented using one of CSS frameworks, which mostly solve cross-browser and printing issues and add niceties such as vertical rhythm and beautiful typography.

There are several CSS frameworks available to implement grids, most famous ones being Blueprint (which is used by sites like QuantCast), 960.gs, and Yahoo UI Grids. There are also others, like this high-quality small CSS framework.

I chose Blueprint because it’s complete and integrates nicely with Compass, a CSS meta-framework for making CSS shorter, much like HAML does for ERB. It also allows to do computations, for example:

.bright
  :font-color !main_color + #663300

Did these changes improve the website? Visit new version, and send your feedback.

PS: Do you know anything like HAML but for PHP?

• Nikon D90 – described as photographer’s camera
• Canon 50D – highly recommended, just

Let’s get things straight. None of D90 features are very different to Canon 50D, but there are several quite important differences:

As you can see, these 2 cameras are not even in the same class, although the price difference is very small – around $250.

So, after weighting all pros and cons, I chose Canon 50D, and I must say it’s an excellent camera. Photographic experience is totally different than it used to be with my old Canon 350D.

• Viewfinder probably as good as it can get with 1.6x crop factor
• Super-sharp, super-bright 640×480 LCD – you can re-shoot bad photos without having to check them on a computer first
• Live view for precise focusing – I couldn’t imagine the camera is still shaking a lot when my hands are rock sturdy after making “stabilization exhale”. Perhaps this technique works for old cameras, but 15MP requires to do things by the book: use a tripod, or a stabilized lens. Apparently IS lens are even more important for getting sharp picture than good glass.
• Live view for black and white photography – all picture styles work also in live view. You can start training your eye for B/W without having to download to a computer.
• Focusing is great – success rate a lot bigger now. New auto-focus system totally rocks.
• Superb menu – very logical and easy to use now. Almost Apple of cameras.

Top Indian Sites

French, UK and Russian websites, top rated in India

See Indian top sites for yourself. How can be 1 million top sites trustworthy if company makes mistakes like this?

Check my Fastest-Growing sites in India if you’re interested what Indian web-o-sphere is all about.

• Microsoft Photosynth was inaccessible for several hours after official launch.
• Twitter’s downtime has become a story by itself. Many people think that’s because they use Ruby on Rails.
• Draugiem.lv, Latvia’s largest social network, had constant uptime problems during first years of operation. By the way, it’s PHP-based.
• One.lv, another popular social network in Latvia, is down for several minutes every night. It’s written in Java/GWT.

And now I see something from a website which is supposed to be always up. After 1 second delay at log in, Google AdSense displays this message:

http://www.google.com/errors/asfe/system_down.html

UPDATE Aug 24 2008: The service is up now. Instead of using traditional practice of showing maintenance times on out of service page, Google posted this on their blog:

This Saturday, August 23rd, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You’ll be unable to log in during these hours, but we’ll continue to track your earnings and serve ads to your pages. For those of you located in different time zones, we’ve provided the maintenance start time for a few international cities:

London – 6pm Saturday
Istanbul – 8pm Saturday
Bangalore – 10:30pm Saturday
Hanoi – 12am Sunday
Auckland – 5am Sunday

Finally, you may have noticed that we’re posting this message a little earlier than usual. Based on your feedback, we’ll do our best to post these maintenance reminders earlier in the week to help you plan ahead. Thanks for the suggestion!

© Chris Clor

Have a look at the list of cameras and lenses used by winners:

• Birds category – Canon EOS 20D + 500mm f/4; Canon EOS 1D MkII + 300mm f/2.8 L IS + 1.4X Teleconverter; Canon EOS 1D MkII + 500mm f/4 IS + 2X Teleconverter
• Wildlife – Nikon D2x + micro Nikkor AF-S VR 105mm; Nikon D2x + 200-400mm f/4 VR; Canon EOS 1Ds MarkII + EF 500mm f/4.5L
• Landscapes – Canon 1Ds MkII + Canon 300mm f/2.8; Canon EOS 20D + Canon 17-40mm; Canon EOS 40D + Canon 10-22mm
• Flora & Macro – Canon 30D + Canon 100mm macro; Canon 40D + Tamron 180mm; Nikon D200 + Sigma 150mm f/2.8 macro
• Elements of Humankind – Nikon D2x + 35-70mm; Canon EOS 5D + Canon 16-35mm f/2.8; Canon EOS 5D + 70-200mm f/4L + 1.4X Teleconverter

As you might have imagined, bird photography is indeed very expensive.

While sudden traffic surges are interesting, new HitGeist focuses on discovering websites which have shown steady growth, and assumes that when traffic is unstable, website is more likely to use non-natural means to attract traffic, such as advertising, PPC campaigns, spam, or spyware.

There are still some bugs to fix, but new stats were so breathtaking that I decided to share them as soon as possible.

The site itself doesn’t look special – design is almost except copy of digg at time vkontakte.ru was created:

All features are standard: friends, photos, videos, messages, notes (blog), groups, and events. There is support for Russian declinations, including gender-specific inflection with support for names, which is quite difficult to implement, for example: Друзья Наталии Искорки (Friends of Nataly Iskorka).

Former soviet republics are recognized, so perhaps website may become popular among Russian-speaking audience in Baltics or Central Asia, and 5.9% of its users already come from Ukraine.

Website owner is Pavel Durov, with user’s id of 1. I’m wondering who’s got id of zero.

To view pages of other users, you have to fill your profile to at least 30%. Perhaps that’s a contributing factor to site’s growth, in addition to quite good picture filtering – you won’t find Olsen Twins photos in profiles here, at least not at first sight. Updating profile photo may be not super-easy for users who got high-megapixel camera or don’t know the difference between BMP and JPG – upload is limited to 5 MB.

I’ve heard rumors that the site grew so quickly because creators took their hands on database of students, which is not impossible given current situation with intellectual property protection in Russia.

Many other Russian Web 2.0 sites copy ideas as well, just check the list at Hitgeist: Trends in Russia. In particular, RuTube, Odnoklassniki.ru and Smotri.com are worth mentioning.

]]> http://rotanovs.com/trends/russian-facebook-copycat-becomes-3-in-russia-in-less-than-a-year/feed/ 3 http://rotanovs.com/trends/russian-facebook-copycat-becomes-3-in-russia-in-less-than-a-year/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/viktorsr/~3/zGDFvY7VIXg/ http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/ruby-19-is-released/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:02:56 +0000 viktors http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/ruby-19-is-released/ Great Christmas gift from matz and other contributors: Ruby 1.9

Some highlights:

• Around 2x performance increase in many cases, thanks to YARV-based code
• Nice syntax enhancements, like (1..10).reduce(:+) # => 55
• JavaScript-style literal hashes: {var: “value”}
• Lots of other enhancements

Ruby 1.9 is a development release, and contains a lot of experimental features. For production, it’s recommended to continue using 1.8 branch.

]]> http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/ruby-19-is-released/feed/ 0 http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/ruby-19-is-released/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/viktorsr/~3/DdRhFiHSAZ8/ http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/jquery-chains-php-spl/#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:18:54 +0000 viktors http://localhost/web-developer/2007/10/29/jquery-style-chainability-in-php-using-spl/ What could be better than chainable operators in jQuery, .addClass(”beautiful”).show(”slow”)-style? Almost nothing, but adding those to PHP would make code cleaner and life easier.

At first sight, implementing these looks almost impossible, but after a quick look at extensions we notice that SPL could offer something similar, if combined with magic methods. Let’s implement ArrayAccess interface and see how it works:

$fruits = new Chain(array(
           new String('apple'),
           new String('mango'),
           new String('kiwi')
)); 

echo "First fruit: ";
echo $fruits[0];
echo "\n"; 

echo "All fruits: ";
echo $fruits->toUpperCase()->join();
echo "\n";

Outputs:

First fruit: apple
All fruits: APPLE, MANGO, KIWI

Beautiful, eh?

Here is a complete listing:

class Chain implements ArrayAccess {
    private $items = array(); 

    public function __construct($items = array()) {
      if (!is_array($items)) return;
      $this->items = $items;
    } 

    public function add($element) {
      $this->items[] = $element;
    } 

    public function __call($method, $args) {
      if (count($this->items)
            && !method_exists($this->items[0], $method)) {
        throw new BadMethodCallException();
      } 

      $returnChain = new Chain();
      foreach($this->items as $item) {
        $returnChain->add(call_user_func_array(array($item, $method), $args));
      }
      return $returnChain;
    } 

    public function rewind() {
      reset($this->items);
    } 

    public function current() {
      return current($this->items);
    }
   public function key() {
      return key($this->items);
    } 

    public function next() {
      return next($this->items);
    } 

    public function valid() {
      return $this->current() !== false;
    } 

    public function offsetExists($offset) {
      return isset($this->items[$offset]);
    } 

    public function offsetGet($offset) {
      return $this->items[$offset];
    } 

    public function offsetSet($offset, $value) {
      return $this->items[$offset] = $value;
    } 

    public function offsetUnset($offset) {
      unset($this->items[$offset]);
    } 

    // convenience method
    public function join($separator = ', ') {
      return implode($this->items, $separator);
    }
} 

class String{
    private $s; 

    public function __construct($s) {
      $this->s = $s;
    } 

    public function toUpperCase() {
      $this->s = strtoupper($this->s);
      return $this;
    } 

    public function __toString() {
      return $this->s;
    } 

} 

$fruits = new Chain(array(
              new String('apple'),
              new String('mango'),
              new String('kiwi')
)); 

echo "First fruit: ";
echo $fruits[0];
echo "\n"; 

echo "All fruits: ";
echo $fruits->toUpperCase()->join();
echo "\n";

]]> http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/jquery-chains-php-spl/feed/ 0 http://rotanovs.com/web-developer/jquery-chains-php-spl/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/viktorsr/~3/Y1Poo__Wnn4/ http://rotanovs.com/photography/canon-40d-vs-nikon-d300/#comments Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:47:33 +0000 viktors http://hitgeist.dev.rotanovs.com/wordpress/play/photography/2007/10/29/canon-40d-vs-nikon-d300/ What a difficult choice—both leaders just released excellent prosumer models. Both dSLRs offer top-notch features like self-cleaning sensor units and low-noise CMOS sensors, the latter being exclusive Canon selling point for several years. But how do they compare now in key characteristics, after Nikon catched up with the competition?

	Canon 40D	Nikon D300
Megapixels	10.1 MP	12.3 MP
Sensor	CMOS, sensitivity up to ISO 1600, 14-bit A/D converter	CMOS, sensitivity up to ISO 3200, 14-bit A/D converter
TTL Auto-Focus	9 cross-type sensors	15 cross-type sensors
Live View Auto-Focus	Yes, turns off LCD while focusing	Yes, contrast detect (like on P&S cameras)
Viewfinder	Pentaprism, 95% frame coverage, 0.95x magnification, diopter adjustment: -3.0 to +1.0	Pentaprism, 100% frame coverage, 0.94x magnification, diopter adjustment: -2.0 to +1.0
LCD Monitor	3.0″, 320×240 pixels	3.0″, 640×480 pixels
B&H Price	$1,299.95 (~900 EUR)	$1,799.95 (~1250 EUR)

For pixel peepers, neither of those are interesting—the real winner is Pentax K10D, which has very light anti-alias filter and offers the best per-pixel sharpness and unique non-processed, completely photographic 3D look—check out some examples. At about $700, with image stabilisation built in, this camera can become a great choice for photographic geeks—imagine its potential after processing photos with DxO Optics v5.

]]> http://rotanovs.com/photography/canon-40d-vs-nikon-d300/feed/ 0 http://rotanovs.com/photography/canon-40d-vs-nikon-d300/