Dispatches From The Internets

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.

I just encountered a DOM implementation issue in IE which took about three hours to solve (and like a year off my life). The story goes like this:

I could not, for the life of me, figure out why a form submitted in Firefox was coming through perfectly while it was missing fields in IE. The form in question has some normal fields and some dynamically generated ones (if JavaScript is enabled). The normal stuff was coming through fine, but I was getting no values for the dynamically generated fields when the form was submitted in IE. I checked the $_REQUEST variable (I am using PHP) to see what was coming through, just to be sure.

Yeah, I’m weighing into the debate on the ALA redesign. I have to say I agree with Jon and Jeremy regarding the fixed 1024px width. My little 2¢; to add to this discussion is that I think more designers should consider the wonderous world of CSS switching based on browser width (see Rammstein or the slightly better implementation on Drink-drive-lose.com’s Ad Challenge). Using this technique, users can view your site at their most comfortable screen resolution and you can still have a nicely designed page for them (fixed or liquid… or both). Can you say zoom layouts? I knew you could.

Congress in going back into session after their summer recess and they will be taking a vote on the Estate Tax (or “Death Tax” as some people like to call it). It is a hotly contested issue that I feel very strongly about. The truth is that a lot of public services depend on the revenue generated by the estate tax and the number of people affected by it is less than 1.4% of the population. I should be so lucky to be wealthy enough for my children to have to pay the Estate Tax.

Just when I had gotten over the loss of Design In-Flight, the magazine relaunches as a web-only publication. From the history/about page:

With the reduction in production efforts with this format, and a slightly less rigid publishing schedule, DiF is sure not to disappear again.