Dispatches From The Internets

I’ve been informed of a great position in southern Connecticut for a strong standards designer/developer. The full-time position is at dLife.com, a site whose primary focus is providing information and support to individuals and families touched by diabetes. The parent company, LifeMed Media, is forming a formidable web team and are planning some great new material for this 11,000+ page site. There’s lots of content to play with and a heavy focus on standards. If you’ve got mad CSS skills and a penchant for semantic markup, this may be up your alley. As the site’s focus is the diabetic community (and diabetes can affect your vision), accessibility knowledge is also a good skill to bring to the table.

Have you ever gone to see a movie that is nothing like the trailer?

It managed to sneak past me for a few days, but my recent interview with Jeremy Keith has made its way into the latest issue of Digital Web Magazine. In the interview we cover the impetus behind his new book, WaSP’s DOM Scripting Task Force, and Jeremy’s future as a rockstar.

On a somewhat tangential note, if you’re interested in competing at the SXSW Web Awards in March, I recommend getting your entires in soon. If you enter by Friday (October 14th), you only have to pay $10 per category which is too cheap to miss out on. If you attend, you’ll get more of Jeremy & me on “How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting.”

I have been hosting on Westhost for a little over four years now with no major complaints and I also host the majority of my clients there. They offer a lot of options for very little money and are always adding new features to the accounts. Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails is not one of them… yet.

As I have begun working a bit more with Rails, I have been looking to get it installed on my server (as well as some of my clients’). One of the major half-truths of Rails evangelism is the ease of install, especially with a host running Apache 1.3. After doing a few rather painful installs myself for some new projects, I finally decided to document the process of installing Ruby on Rails at Westhost for my own knowledge and to help any others who may be trying to do the same. Hopefully, Westhost will soon start to offer Rails installs as part of their hosting packages, but, until then, I offer up this humble tutorial.

I’ve had a few interesting things come through my inbox of late and I thought I would share them with you:

• The CT Forum will be hosting A Conversation… Thomas Friedman & Malcolm Gladwell on 6 April 2006 in Hartford, Connecticut. This should be pretty interesting to witness as Gladwell’s Tipping Point and blink. have been incredibly influential in the business world and Fiedman’s The World is Flat is also starting to make some heads turn. Not sure if I am going yet or not, but it looks to be pretty cool.
• For those of you looking for socially responsible places to donate money for victims of Katrina, Radical Reference has compiled a great list for your reference.
• I’m a little late on this one, but today is the deadline for applications to intern at the League of Young/Independent/Pissed Off Voters. There are a ton of positions availble in New York City for the fall. This is a great organization and I highly recommend hooking up with them if politics is your bag. To apply, send a statement of interest and any relevant resume to erubinstein@indyvoter.org with “INTERNSHIP—? in the subject line.

With all of the travelling I was doing last week, I forgot to mention that some of the sites Dave & I have worked at Cronin and Company on took home WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association. We took home two “Outstanding Website” awards (think silver) for our sites for Middlesex Hospital and the Drink-Drive-Lose Ad Challenge. I was perticularly stoked as I was the designer of both sites and single-handedly built the Ad Challenge site which had a lot of complex application-level code behind it. We also took home a “Standard of Excellence” award (think bronze) for the site we built for Garelick Farms’ Over the Moon Milk product launch. I’m not a big fan of that site’s design (not because it wasn’t mine), but I love the game Dave built.

I’ve been insanely busy building a new Rails app for a client and travelling a lot for speaking engagements. I just got back from an incredible trip to San Jose (well, Cupertino actually) where Molly, Andy and I were doing some training. I had an amazing time with both of them and it was really fun to see Andy in action (I, unfortunately, did not have the peasure of seeing him rock the audience at @media). We had a really great group of conference attendees too. I am a little saddened that this was my last stop on the WOW tour (I am missing Hawaii as it takes place on election day, but more on that later), but I have heard some rumblings that the show may go back on the road for a European leg. Fingers crossed.

In the wake of the tragedy that befel the citizens of and visitors to New Orleans recently, I’ve been amazed at the amount of support and kindness being shown to the survivors (Barbara Bush’s comments notwithstanding). Help has come from the likely places as well as some unlikely ones and I am sure most of you have already donated money, blood and possibly even a room or two in your house/apartment. While a good deal of assistance is still needed for our fellow humans, there are others in need too: their displaced pets.

It’s funny, but the more I take on, the more zen I get about work. Perhaps it’s the recent addition of a daily trek to the gym in the wee hours of the morning which is getting my day off to a better start. Or maybe it’s the Pragmatic philosophy which is beginning to take hold since finishing The Pragmatic Programmer and starting Agile Web Development with Rails. Who knows, but I am thankful for the calm.