Trey Connell

I long ago decided to use JQuery over other javascript frameworks like Prototype. JQuery just seems to fit with the way I think about solutions and how to attack challenges. I also think the community is amazing, with many new tools and tutorials and exciting APIs springing up everywhere.

One such tool is from Flowplayer and is called, simply, JQuery Tools. In short, JQuery Tools is an implementation that provides easy to implement:

• Tabs
• Tooltips
• Expose′ Behavior
• Scrollable Areas
• Flash Embeds

The demos and code examples on the site are easy to follow and fun to play with. If you’re looking for a nice library for common UI effects and elements, take a look at JQuery Tools from Flowplayer.

We were recently working on a rake task to generate an XML Sitemap of a site’s content for submission to the search engines. Because we are trying to remain as RESTful as possible, I wanted to take advantage of the helpers given to me automatically. For example, to generate the URL for an article, I simply have to do article_url(my_article). This would result in something like /articles/my-article-headline-is-cheesy.

I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to make Rake aware of my routing and the RESTful helpers that I SHOULD be able to use to dry up my code and ensure very little manual maintenance when and if we decided to change our routing in the future. There had to be a way!

It turns out there indeed exists a way to make this happen.  You simply have to place “include ActionController::UrlWriter” at the top of your rake task.  Ultimately url_for is called when you do something like article_url(my_article), and url_for requires a host which it won’t have.  So change your code to read article_url(a, :host => “www.mysite.com”). Voila – route helpers inside your rake task.

I’m really excited this morning because the latest DLC for Borderlands is finally out. It’s called “The Secret Armory of General Knox” and costs 800 Microsoft Points. Along with the new story, you’ll also be able to break through the previous Level cap of 50. I’ve been told you can now level up to 61, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.

I downloaded and played through “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” – a previous DLC for Borderlands – and it was fantastic. Great, new story. Lots of new, bad-ass enemies. And well worth the money. I just hope this DLC is going to be as good. I have it downloading right now (it’s 1.66 Gigabytes) so I plan on finding out tonight!

I’ve purposely held off on making any comments or observations about the Apple iPad, but now I feel almost compelled to put a few simple notes down “on paper”.

The iPad is big enough to be a netbook but without all the features on the netbook that I currently own. And I paid $300 for my netbook.

It looks like a really big iPhone except I can’t make calls from it. Even if I could make calls I wouldn’t because no one wants to hold a netbook-sized device to their ear unless it has some sort of boom box cover graphic on it. Even then it’s dicey.

I suppose what it’s really most like is a gigantic iTouch. And I never even considered purchasing one of those – even for the briefest of moments.

So I guess, in general, I just don’t get it. I’m not sure who Apple is targeting with thie iPad. Now…give me an iPad that runs Snow Leopard, and one would be sitting on my desk right now.

Some of my friends on Xbox Live are outright achievement whores. I never have tried to boost my gamerscore outside of the normal games I was going to play anyway.  Then I happened to run across this post on gamesradar.com. They list the top 10 games of 2009 when it comes to obtaining easy achievement points. Be prepared – your pride is going to suffer a bit if you go after some of these games (Who can live with Hannah Montana showing on your completed games list??? Some things in life are just not worth it.)

I rented Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. Now this game had ratings that ranged from a 5 to a 6 out of 10 which is pretty damn bad for a video game. For that reason, I never even considered playing it when it came out. I decided to suffer through it anyway since the author says they gained nearly 800 points on their first playthrough.

It turns out that Eat Lead is sorely underrated – at least in my opinion. The gameplay and mechanics are indeed a bit off, and that mainly revolves around the cover system. But once you get the hang of things and realize you can’t just spray and pray in every room you enter, the game’s story takes over and gives you some genuinely intriguing plot lines and pretty funny one-liners.

I finished the game in about 8 hours and gained 815 achievement points. And I actually had FUN doing it. So if you’re looking for a decent shooter that’s unlike the other clones out there, then pick up Eat Lead. Go into it with an open mind and some patience, and I think you’ll find it’s a lot of fun.

Anyone notice there are a TON of great video games out right now? I’m currently playing Dragon Age and Borderlands (second play-through), but there are so many other great games to play that I wouldn’t even begin to have enough time to play them all.  Here are some games I’m jonesing for:

1. Mass Effect 2
2. Bioshock 2
3. Assassin’s Creed 2
4. Darksiders
5. Army of Two: The 40th Day
6. New Super Mario Brother
7. Bayonneta

I guess I’ll be patient and wait for them to come in one-at-a-time from my Gamefly.com, but I’m fighting the urge to go to Target and just load up one of those little red baskets.

I wanted to implement a simple captcha for for article comments on a site. And by simple, I mean both in aesthetics and in functionality. After looking around, I found this post that described how you could implement a plugin called Simple Captcha in 10 minutes or less.

The plugin requires RMagick and ImageMagick which takes a little while to install.  So if you don’t have those, then the title of the post probably won’t hold true for you.  After you have everything installed, it takes one line of code in your view and one line of code in your controller to implement the captcha.

Just what I was looking for!

It’s good to see the Razorbacks will be going to a bowl game this year. We’ll be playing East Carolina in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, TN. We bought 4 tickets and are going with some friends of ours who we always tailgate with when Arkansas plays in Little Rock.

I really think Arkansas showed their potential this year although I have to admit I was hoping for a bit better record and a better showing in the SEC. I hate to be the typical “wait till next year!” fan, but I’m excited about seeing how far Bobby Petrino can take the Razorbacks and their newfound offensive prowess next year. If we can get the defense to show up at every game, we should have a chance for a really good season. I’m not talking BCS bowl yet, but we should get close.

As for this year’s Liberty Bowl, my prediction is that we DESTROY East Carolina. Conference USA??  C’mon – no way that team can compete with us – especially considering that playing in Memphis is going to be almost like a home game for the Razorbacks.

Go Hogs!

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I purchased the annual subscription to peepcode.com which gives me access to all screencasts and PDF eBooks they offer for one year. If they add new material after I purchased, I still get access to it – as long as my 1-year subscription hasn’t expired. I’ve found the screencasts to be of great quality and very helpful for introducing me to new concepts, languages, and tools. It’s really nice to sit back with a cup of joe and watch an instructor sometimes, and these guys do a great job.

The Pragmatic Programmers write some of the best development books out there. The great news is now they offer everything in electronic format – including PDF, .epub (eBook), and .mobi (mobile version). At an average cost of around $24 for all 3 electronic versions, these books are a steal. Also, there is no DRM and the Pragmatic Programmers site states that you are free to distribute the files to other members of your team. I purchased around 10 books and simply placed them in a secure location for our team to download.

All in, I spent about $400 for a wealth of knowledge and portable information that I can distribute to our team. That’s hard to beat when you’re trying to continue and encourage the growth of your employees but the economy is telling you to take a hike.

As creative and talented people, web designers and developers sometimes get into a funk – usually called “burn out”. I believe much of that funk can be attributed to their ever-dwindling patience with the very people they are there to serve – the customers.

It doesn’t matter if that customer is internal or external to your organization. Your job as a creative is to articulate the value of what you are proposing. And not only that, you also have to describe the process you’re going to follow in order for both you and your customer to achieve success. Finally, you have to make the sale and convince them to pay your price. That could be the internal time frame you need or real greenbacks. Sounds straightforward right? Well, it’s not.

I believe much of our frustration comes from customers who think they already know how it should be done, what’s involved, and ultimately devalue our contribution to the project. How many times have you had a customer deliver a document describing what they want on the home page of their site only to then have them turn around and say designing that home page should only take a few days because they’ve “practically done all the work already”.

What about when you build a new feature that does X but then the customer decides they want it to do Y. It’s all fun and games until the customer then asks you to revert back to X. Furthermore they think because X was already built, it’s basically like simply changing lanes on a highway or making a U-turn. “You should be able to have X back in place this afternoon right”? Slow down sparky.

Now it’s your job to explain how that code was branched a long, long time ago and you’ll have to merge it back into the product months later when 9,000 other things have been added since then. Then you’re going to have to run your testing routines and possibly do manual regression tests on the entire system to ensure you haven’t borked everything. Then THEY are going to need to test it and approve it for production launch because their idea of X 3 months ago is probably not going to be what they think X should be today. As you know, the list of details goes on and ultimately you spend 8 hours putting something in place that the customer thinks should have taken 15 minutes.

Circling to my original point, if you can’t properly and effectively communicate what you are doing, why you have to do it, the processes involved, and WHY YOU KNOW BEST AS THE EXPERT ON THE PROJECT then you’re setting yourself up for some major frustration. In my experience, customers just don’t know what they don’t know. If you take the time to explain it to them and justify what you already know is the correct approach, you’ll find your working relationship with them will improve and they will start to question less and move forward more.

We use Java as the foundation for our product framework at work. While we’ve always been pleased with Java compared to the P’s in LAMP (PHP and Perl), I’ve often wondered, “Is there an easier way? Do we really need all these pieces and parts that make up our stack? Can we build sites faster and with more predictable results?” While I think Java is a fantastic language, I think it tries to be all things to all people. We don’t need to write embedded systems. We don’t need to tie together disparate systems with middleware. We don’t need massive EJB deployments. We need to build feature-rich, dependable, scalable, and beautiful web sites. And we need to build them yesterday quickly.

Enter Ruby on Rails. I’ve been using Ruby on Rails outside of work for about a year now. The first thing I will say is that it’s FUN. At my age I don’t want to futz around with bits and bytes, memory allocation, and the like. Ruby on Rails seems to let me focus on building cool stuff and not on wrestling with the framework to bend it to my will.

The second thing I’ll say is it’s easy to get up and running and to deploy changes to your applications. We have a very intensive build and deploy process surrounding Java and our sites. Nothing makes me more frustrated than spending 30 seconds to fix a typo and having to go through a 15 minute deployment process. With Ruby on Rails, that pain point goes away since I can make changes to my code or my templates and simply refresh my browser to see those changes.

The last thing I’ll say is that I’ve been using Java for a long time and part of my infatuation with Ruby on Rails may simply be due to the fact that it’s new and exciting. Regardless, we’re going to continue to explore the Ruby on Rails framework for our next major iteration of our product. I think at the very least that it’s a good exercise, and we may just find that we need to take the plunge and move away from Java for our future web development efforts.

I love funny t-shirts, and the fact that I wear so many t-shirts (working at home!) guarantees that I’m going to wear them out quickly and need to refresh the collection. I found a great new online store to get funny t-shirts called Rizzo Tees.

Chris – the owner – runs the company out of his basement for now, but you’d never know it when it comes to his customer service. I’ve placed multiple orders with Rizzo Tees, and communication regarding my orders has always been top-notch. Chris also interacts with his customers over Twitter which gives everything a real personal service touch.

I really think Rizzo Tees is an example of a company who has it right – leverage social media, provide a simple online storefront with great products, and provide stellar customer service. When you combine those three things, you truly have something special.

Now go buy some t-shirts!