Trey Connell

GameBanshee was nice enough to put together an annotated map of Skyrim. You can take a look at the png or download the pdf on their site.

Skyrim Map

Tradeomics.com is offering members who add 5 video games between now and Dec 15 the chance to win their pick of a FREE brand new game of their choice. The winner will be selected through a random drawing and can choose from Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3, and Skyrim on the console of their choice.

Sign up and add your old games today!

Tradeomics is a new web site whose goal is to make it super easy to find items you want and swap them for items you have. It’s like E-Bay but no money is exchanged between members – only items like video games, books, movies, and anything else you can think of.

You can become a member and add all your items for free. You can browse and follow other members, find items you want, propose and negotiate trades, and communicate with other members. Once the terms of your trade are complete both parties accept the trade. At that point your account is charged 2 credits for each of your items. Credits can be purchased for $1 each.

Sign Up on Tradeomics.com Now!

Screenshots (click to enlarge)

Home Page

Browse Members

Browse Items

Notifications & Preferences

Dashboard

Negotiate and Trade

Disclaimer: I built Tradeomics.com with co-founder Nick Brewer.

I’ve been using Textmate for a long time and am a huge fan. A friend recommended I try Sublime Text 2. Holy crap it is awesome, and I may not be going back to Textmate.

Here are some great tips to get you started.

Nick Brewer, Luke Irvin and I headed up to Barcamp Jonesboro a couple of weeks ago. I really didn’t know what to expect. It’s been so long since I’ve been to any kind of conference or seminar regarding technology, and I don’t exactly get out and socialize with fellow geeks and tech folks since I work from home. I was pleasantly surprised and really got a lot out of the event.

Luke Irvin gave a great introductory talk on iOS development. I also sat in on some good talks about social media strategies, protecting your web site from hackers, tools for developers and designers, and going through startup accelerator programs. There was also some really great swag and giveaways throughout the day including an iPad 2! (no I didn’t win it)

The facilities were really nice at ASU (unlike their web site. Yikes!). We used two rooms – one large and one a bit smaller. The folks there did a great job of grilling hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch and helping us stay organized and on track.

Afterwards we went to Cregeen’s for dinner and drinks. I got to meet another team that just launched their startup – TrakQR. They focus on providing dynamic QR codes for businesses and are a great bunch of people! I really enjoyed getting to know them and also giving them a sneak peak of our application – Tradeomics.

All in all, it was well worth the $15 and the drive to Jonesboro, and I’m looking forward to going again next year. Now if we could just get a Barcamp organized in Conway.

P.S. – if you’re interested in trading your items online (phones, video games, laptops, whatever!) then head on over to Tradeomics and sign up for a BETA invitation. We’ll be opening it up to those who signed up very soon!

I found a nice plugin for JQuery or Protype called Chosen.  Chosen allows you to turn ordinary and unwieldy select boxes into super sweet, user-friendly versions of themselves.

Here’s an example:

I run into problems using CSS floats for columns of content that vary in height all the time. You wind up with strange gaps in your content and unpredictable white space across different browser types. I ran across JQuery Masonry the other day, and it looks very promising for making that CSS float headache go away. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I will be the next time I need divs of varying height arranged in a specific order and layout.

With CSS Floats:

With JQuery Masonry:

Nick Brewer pointed me at Active Admin recently, and I think I’m going to try to use it in a project very soon. Active Admin generates a modern administration interface for your Ruby on Rails application. It seems to go well beyond the typical CRUD operations supported by other generators and has a really nice looking UI to boot.

Test your regular expressions using Rubular.

SproutCore is a javascript framework for building applications online.

I haven’t used it, but it looks really interesting.

I built a new site in conjunction with a buddy of mine in order to offer some really valuable insurance products online.  I’m not a designer as we all know, but I think my minimal skills did a pretty good job.  You can check out the site at http://www.gcinsurancequotes.com.

Typically you use the error_messages_for method in Rails to show the model validations that have failed at the top of a reloaded form so the user can take action and resubmit. It’s a really slick way to handle server-side validations and client side communication.

Today, I started seeing the following while I was testing some new functionality around a form:

{{count}} errors prohibited this {{model}} from being saved

{{attribute}} {{message}}

{{attribute}} {{message}}

{{attribute}} {{message}}

After doing some searching around, I realized I had upgraded the i18n gem from 0.4.2 to 0.5.0.  All I had to do was install 0.4.2 and remove 0.5.0 and my error messages started showing correctly again.