Every hurdle a user has to hop through to get to the meat of what they’re trying to do on your site is another opportunity for them to opt out.
Lazy registration, where you get the minimum possible (dead link to webjackalope) from your users and get more information form them as time goes on, is where it’s at (in fact, increasingly technologies like OpenID and OAuth might even make lazy registration redundant).
At some point all web applications and sites, if they’re popular, need to think about how to scale past their database bottleneck. All the big boys these days are using memcached, and with very good reason (even those not using Rails).
Rails has fantastic support for memcached and this great screencast bad link from the guys at RailsEnvy goes over when and how you should use it in your app with some very good real life examples.
I use rake tasks pretty much, well… everywhere in my Rails programs. They’re amazingly handy for automating things I want to keep track of, mailing things out to people regularly and just generally doing useful stuff.
Firing them on a timer though usually involves going in and manually editing cron with the infamous crontab -e
Hand-edited is no problem for me, but when distributing code it is a little annoying since you usually have to put instructions in for people to do it manually and its one of those things people always forget to do.
Love this diagram from Bud Caddell on getting yourself into the Hooray zone for optimum business happiness. Not just for startups, I want this for my department. Love the underdog kung fu ideas this encapsulates.
Loving Umair Haque these days and his excellently penned essays on the zombieconomy and how we got into this trouble in the first place How not to Hummer your business .
What is unnovation? It’s when your business eats its children and destroys the long term value it has been creating (if you’re lucky) by focusing on seductive, easy short-term profits. Great rant illustrated by the Hummer, but insert your value-destroying business move from the 90’s and noughts here.
Frightening short piece from the Atlantic about the effects of Tiananmen censorship on cultural memory. I find this amazingly Orwellian and chilling as all hell. I think we all hope to live in a world where censorship doesn’t work as a form of repression.
I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past… But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.
Wow. Pretty incredible trailer for the video game Star Wars: The Old Republic. Don’t know anything about the game itself but have to say this is the best teaser for a video game I have ever seen. Seeths drama, menace, and intrigue.
I so want someone to come up with a Wii game I can duel with my WiiRemote like a lightsaber to… ;-)
I love the work the folks at MySociety are doing these days. Mapumental is a great bit of geekery allowing someone to figure out where they can live based on commute, housing prices and scenery. Check out the jaw-dropping demo below since the thing is still in private beta. I so wish they would have this for rental prices added in.
Great article in copyblogger about how to tighten up your copy to make sure you kill those sales conversion trolls .
Avoid the carney, the sea-monkeys, and the trolls. Write content to be identifiable, engender trust, and provide clarity on calls to action.
Ahhh… finally, the Google Wave developer preview of Google’s HTML 5 re-imagining of online collaboration and communications at Google’s I/O conference.
The interesting idea of it as a Product, Platform (for the embedding of things in the web) and Protocols as well as the re-visioning of email if it had been invented today, kinda sorts well with actual usage. For example, in the demo, the use of email and then a sort of “in-email” IM session (we’re going to need new verbs and adjectives, I can tell) being used is pretty similar to what really happens in real life though you generally have to jump to a new app and those conversations end up being isolated form each other. So, at least that idea in Wave is sound.