joshuago’s Bookmarks

23 APR 2011
[Yehuda Katz] Rubygems Good Practice

Use simple requires in your library. If you need to catch the case where the dependency could not be found, rescue from plain old LoadError, not Gem::LoadError.

23 APR 2011
Riding Rails: Gem Packaging: Best Practices

Don't mess with the load path. Define VERSION. Declare gem dependencies in your gemspec, not in your "lib/" subdirectory.

18 APR 2011
[NY Times] Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

As soon as you sit down, electrical activity in the muscles drops. Levels of the enzymes responsible for vacuuming fat out of your bloodstream plunge.

14 APR 2011
[Wil Shipley] Success, and Farming vs. Mining

The secret of success turns out to be so incredibly simple: Work your ass off.

12 APR 2011
[The Washington Post] The trials of Kaplan Higher Ed and the education of The Washington Post Co.

How a newspaper company got in the business of for-profit higher education and took heat for exploiting the poor. Also, how it benefited from government policy and dealt with internal culture clashes.

07 APR 2011
[Alex Walker] The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers

Prime numbers applied to repeating background images for amazing results.

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31 MAR 2011
BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti On Why The “Facebook” Media World View Wins

Provoke emotional reactions instead of informing. Take with a grain of salt, but remember that traffic means ads, ads mean money, and money is like life-giving blood to any business.

30 MAR 2011
[Warpspire] Product design at GitHub

It takes balls to abandon features — grow some.

28 MAR 2011
[The Washington Post] Behind The Post’s redesigned Web site

The Post on its move to a new web-based CMS, Methode. Apparently cost them $7 million, but at least it's used by a bunch other big-name papers such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.

25 MAR 2011
[Bob Buch] Stop Calling it Content

Those of us looking to produce high quality content for the web should consider the possibility that our first problem is that we’re calling it content. This commoditizes it and sends the message that quality doesn't matter.