Mandarin Soda

Happened yesterday. Let’s play some Philip Glass Sesame Street music in celebration. List of features here. So, what’s on the roadmap for 3.0?

New article from Sitepoint discussing OpenID and various microformats to make your social networking application more integration and data flow friendly. Nice to see more discussion of “open” standards in this space…

Just saw a posting about the Boilerplate framework, which made me wonder who out there uses CSS frameworks like Blueprint or Yahoo? And if you do use them, why? Does this type of work really require libraries or is it more of a standards encouragement sorta thing?

For some reason, I tend to forget that the folks at Sitepoint blog with some frequency alongside their publishing business. I suppose its because, like most of their book titles, I’m not terribly intrigued by their somewhat basic or generic content, probably because its not even really aimed at folks like me. Anyway, preamble aside, [...]

Nice post here about creating seed data for Rails applications. I used migrations for a while in a previous application and found it to be quite annoying when trying to keep things in synch with numerous migrations over time.

Ezra posted an excellent explanation of his Merb framework late yesterday.

Meant to post this nice synopsis of a much longer technical paper detailing Amazon’s distributed key-value storage system earlier this month. While Dynamo is not yet offered as a public API from Amazon, the author conjectures that it someday might, which leads to myy favorite quote from the article: Finally, Amazon is showing openness – [...]

The Addison Wesley Professional Ruby Series just released a new shortcut on the somewhat contentious subject of Ruby performance entilted Writing Efficient Ruby Code written by the highly regarded Rails performance expert Dr. Stefan Kaes. So far (page 10), I’m impressed by the content. Most languages need (and some have) general best practices guides such [...]

Bamboo blog has some good tips on database optimization for Rails apps. Adam Keys on creating micro-apps using existing infrastructure and APIs like Foamee does with Twitter. Good presentation on application interface design.. New Rails restful help with the plugin resource_this. 40 design books from Smashing Magazine. Oracle has built a JRuby application Oracle Mix.

Great article on tools for making social networking sites more portable. Corkd’s use of microformats is also covered in greater depths in a recent microformats book