thoughts to blog

Rails Routes

WARNING: Geek Post

In the Rails world, you have these things called resource routes…

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Resources.html

You can define how the url gets translated into which controller and action, based on REST principles, thin controllers, and fat data models.

Image, if you will, you see this in your routes file:

This already describes a lot about your application:

• There will be a /users path
• You will have a User model
• The user has a shopping cart, many favorites, a profile, and friends. Each with their own matching model.

Granted, I could have done this too:

But like I said, it describes a lot about the application your building…

Arguably enough to be able to generate: controllers, actions, views, models, and basic functional tests… The only thing it doesn’t describe is the fields you’re collecting about each object.

So my question becomes: If Rails is all about RESTful resources, why don’t we focus on simple generation of an application based on the routes.rb file. Since the HTTP Verb and the Resource URL are important and the routes.rb describes those two, why not start there?

Conversationlist

So I briefly talked about Twitter lists a few days ago… and already there are some interesting things happening with them:

1. Listorious.com - the first obvious implementation after someone gives you data is a directory that is taggable and searchable.

2. Of course the huge thing is discovery… I created a DFW list that has 14 people following it and has over 135 people on it.

3. Conversationlist - this one popped up this morning reading @jonsteinberg’s tweet. It’s a tool that keeps track of who you talk about, the people that influence you. It constantly updates with people who you interact with on Twitter. Interesting!

In starting to think about this, there are immediate limitations that come up: it’s just a list of people. But when you break out of that mind block, you’ll see some more interesting ways to interact with this. News organizations and higher profile people are creating a “Must See” ecosystem of people. An example is Tim O’Reilly’s Government 2.0 list: http://twitter.com/timoreilly/gov20

At any rate, enough about Twitter lists…

By the way, my wife, Becca, finally joined Twitter: @BeccaKGood

Twitter Lists

Recently, Twitter released Lists… a capability that people have been asking for, for a while.

For example, I created a list of all the cool DFW people I follow:

http://twitter.com/gooberdlx/dallas-fort-worth

You can then follow that list.. or follow other people’s lists.

This begs for 2 questions:

1. How will this change Follow Friday? I could easily see some Follow Friday list generator applications…

2. How long is it before spammers find a unique way to take advantage of this tool.

Either way there is an opportunity for some more utilities and data goodies here :)

Still undetermined for me…

When you follow a list, does it send notification to everyone on the list? What about if new people are added to that list? What does following a list really mean?

TEDxSMU

Today I witnessed, quite possibly, the best group gathering I have ever been to in my life (unless you count my wedding as one).

TEDxSMU

TED is a “conference” that focuses on inspiring people with other people’s stories… sharing information and motivation that propels people to innovate and start something. “Ideas worth spreading”

TEDxSMU is part of the TEDx campaign where it brings smaller scale versions of TED to other cities and countries…

Why would I say that it’s quite possibly the best group gathering I’ve ever been to? Let me describe to you the people I sat down and had actual conversations with:

William Kamkwamba… as in the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind that you’ve all been seeing on TV, listening to his story about how he saved his village with a windmill made from a few spare parts. I spent a few minutes engaging William and asking questions about how this whirl wind (::groan::) of international media attention has affected him. You could easily tell he was overwhelmed, but starting to get used to it.

Turk Pipkin… Created a non-profit organization and filmed how he has helped villages in Kenya build schools and provide sustainable resources to help feed communities and keep fresh, running water flowing. All while documenting this with film. Fascinating work.

Ira Greenberg…Talked with Ira for a few minutes about his artwork involving generative graphics and audio. His installation is entirely dynamic (both audio and visual) and generates based on interactions with the environment. Definitely my cup of tea.

Arthur Benjamin… The Mathemagician, who can calculate the square of a 5 digit number within minutes in his head. He taught the entire audience the quick and easy way to square any 2 digit number. I’ll have to show you sometime.

Lewis Warren… is a 13 year old piano prodigy. Started playing the piano at 3, composing pieces by 5, and has since toured the world with his gift.

and my personal favorite

Anousheh Ansari… The first woman in the private sector to travel to space. Absolutely thrilling as her family is also the sponsor of the $10 MM X Prize… Yeah, literally, the X Prize. I had a chat with her and her husband about space, the future of private funded space exploration, and other technology related topics. She’s incredibly approachable and she’s been to space. Need I say more?

Indescribable how I feel right now…

stranger things have happened

If you visit thoughtstoblog.com, you’ll notice that I’ve changed blogging platforms once again… the old posts might show up eventually, because there were a few that got some attention…

But for the most part, I’m not missing it. I’ll figure out how to get the archive up eventually…

What happened?

I got sick of comment spam.

The previous system was home grown and didn’t have a sophisticated enough spam filtering. I was getting 200 a day and weeding out the good from the bad became too much of a hassle. I’ve also been deciding to host my blog in the cloud because I really think there are some neat tools out there for content publishing that I want to try out… which leads me to…

What blogging platform did you choose?

I was having issues choosing between Posterous and tumblr. I like Posterous because it had an easy email in interface and did some nice content conversion, multiple images in emails get turned into slideshows and gist urls get auto-embedded for code snippets. I liked tumblr because it allowed you to hack the HTML, built in themes, and integrated with Disqus, which is a new cloud hosted commenting system that travels with you, allows you to really have conversations on blogs and bring them into the social world.

And while I really wish the two services would combine forces, I quickly realized that for the front facing website, I needed a way to keep my feed burner RSS feed and have a decent look and feel. tumblr beat out Posterous there.

But!! BUT!! :: cue cheeky suspensful sound :: … Posterous has built in content distribution and one of those options is tumblr. This presents me with a win-win situation as I can take advantage of the features in one and use the other for my front end. I really love cloud computing and Web 2.0 companies :). And best of all, if I end up not liking tumblr and Posterous gives me some more front end flexability, it’ll be pretty transparent to flop over engines as the content will come from Posterous first…

Going forward…

I hope to make some more shorter posts, some content from twitter, some more pictures, and hopefully a decrease in comment spam.