Update: you don’t need Skitch invites anymore, just sign up .
Screencasts are powerful things. I’m one of the many people who discovered Rails (yes, and TextMate) thanks to the original screencast. My first encounter with online screencasts was a little earlier, the company Marketcircle produced excellent screencast tutorials for DayLite , their productivity application (and one of the best OSX apps ever). This was a novelty at the time, and very effective. These days screencasts are omnipresent, and so when it came time to think about the help section for a web app I am developing, my instinctive reaction was the screencast option.
But, screencasts have some drawbacks. If you include an audio track on your screencast, then you make things difficult for cubicle-dwellers. They have to either annoy their neighbours or watch your screencast in soundless confusion. Yes, I have earphones at my desk, and you probably do too, but believe it or not a lot of...
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Can your DNS do this?From: ananelson.com
Post Date: 2008-01-12 08:25:14
The internet is all about instant gratification. That goes for producers as well as consumers. Generally the biggest shock a novice web developer will experience is when they realize that their shiny new domain won’t be accessible for up to 2 days. 2 days? DAYS? That’s an eternity on the web. Not only do you have to wait, but you have to wait an unpredictable amount of time, and just because the domain name has propagated to you doesn’t mean the rest of the world will be able ...
more Remote Rake Tasks with CapistranoFrom: ananelson.com
Post Date: 2007-12-30 07:42:42
Here’s the punch line:
namespace :rake do
task :show_tasks do
run("cd #{deploy_to}/current; /usr/bin/rake -T")
end
end
This is a Capistrano task which invokes Rake on the remote server. It’s the obvious answer to a problem which has been vexing me for weeks. I’ve been trying, without success, to convert a nice little Rake task
require ’lib/hodel_3000_compliant_logger’
namespace :log do
desc "Annotate the logfile with a message. Options ...
more Microsoft’s Inner Geek is ShowingFrom: ananelson.com
Post Date: 2007-12-13 15:54:25
If you’re like me, you will have completely ignored the many announcements about Silverlight , Microsoft’s new framework for media-rich web applications. A few positive reports from unexpected sources did reach my ears, but they weren’t really enough to broach the Microsoft-impermeable membrane which has built up over the years. Even if I had been lucky enough to get to RubyConf this year, I probably would have skipped the IronRuby presentation .
So, I was surprised to fin...
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