Entries Tagged 'How-to' ↓

Calling all geeks!

It’s time to band together and drop the funk.

Geek is the new hip, haven’t you heard?  Geek tattoos are chic.  Librarian glasses are sexy.   Weird is in.  And you can be, too.

Oddly Zen is seeking collaborators and guest-bloggers for full-time, part-time, or one-off content contributions in the areas of:

• Ajax (tips, tricks, tutorials, or opinion)
• Apple
• Blogging (the business, the practice, or general coverage)
• Books (ebooks, free chapters, or book reviews)
• Business
• CMS (reviews, open-source projects, WordPress, etc.)
• Community (open source, Ruby or Rails, social media, etc.)
• CSS (tips, tricks, tutorials, or opinion)
• Design (UI, HCI, UX, etc.)
• Graphics (Photoshop or Fireworks tips, tricks, tutorials, or opinion)
• Humor (geek is funny)
• Linux
• Marketing
• Microsoft
• Open source software
• Pimp that App (case studies, tips, tricks, tutorials, or opinion)
• Politics (active and apathetic)
• Programming (mainly Ruby & Co. — possibly C#, Lisp, Erlang, etc.)
• Stranger than Fiction (truth be told, geeky situations are weird and funny)
• WordPress (development, customization, plug-ins, etc.)
• Your Ideas (if it’s geek, or plain good, we’ll post it)

Increase your reach.  Enhance your image.  Be flagrantly geeky.

And get some link-backs all from the comfort of your cube.

Note:  Think of this as an open-source blog.  Contribution should make you feel good. 

Also, I’m looking for someone (preferably one other person) to build a Rails application with.  It will be a gift to the community as well — and if it makes any cheese, we’ll donate it.

Guess who’s back, back again…?

Is your application a hooptie? Could it stand a ghetto-fabulous makeover of MTV-sized proportions? Chances are, even if it is washed and waxed, it could probably move on up to the big time by following a few nuggets of kind reflection.

I’ve been kicking around some thoughts and observations of various social media sites and APIs. And guess what? My eyes have seen the glory of the pimping of your app. That’s right — just follow these golden rules and you, too, can go from limp to pimp.
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I recently created a plug-in for TinyMCE, the rich text editor, to handle image uploads, creation of thumbnails, and a gallery for insertion into the TinyMCE editor.  I am super-busy — working full-time, writing a book (due out soon!), and juggling life, family, and everything-else-under-the-sun — but I am committed to writing a tutorial on how I accomplished this magical feat.  (At least I’m impressed. :-))  Anyway, check back for updates.  If I’m feeling especially magnanimous, I might even package it up for release…

I encountered an error today with a Rails Ajax drag ‘n drop and sortable list I developed for a client. Scouring the production logs, I saw:

/!\ FAILSAFE /!\  Wed Apr 16 14:19:18 -0500 2008
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
can't modify frozen string

After some Googling, I saw a couple posts in the Ruby on Rails talk Google Group. Sure enough, others were experiencing the problem, but there was no reported solution. Apparently there is even a patch in the Rails core — or at least a ticket in for the problem. But, I don’t think that is necessary, because I came up with a solution without having to patch the core. More ⊕

I discovered a pretty cool technique for you image-manipulators. You, too, can make some of your favorite photos look like they were actually photographs of miniatures… Why, you might ask?

That, I don’t know, but it sure is fun.

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