Last week I gave my third annual talk to our local high school’s programming/computer science class. The classes are taught by Analy High math… Read more »
Creating a Lasting Website as a Personal Archive
I created this website as a way to publish my blog posts, essays, photographs, and a few other projects. My focus is on creating… Read more »
Gigabit Fiber Has Arrived!
Today, my household entered the true age of broadband. Sure, we’ve been there for years, depending on how you define it. But this is… Read more »
New Online Courses for Web Designers: HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and Mobile
Teaching has long been one of my favorite activities. In the past five years, most of the teaching I’ve done has been online, through… Read more »
The iPad: Imperfect, But Enough for Me!
I’ve been lusting after a great tablet device for a long time. The iPad has its faults, but it’s the first that really appeals… Read more »
A Brief History of the Web, and a Glimpse of Its Future
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Sebastopol, the first-ever local Ignite event. Started a couple years ago by O’Reilly… Read more »
Adventures in Social Media
I was not an early adopter of social media, being of twice the optimum age. But in the past few months, I’ve become much… Read more »
HP’s Service Disaster
I’ve had HP printers for a long, long time, since the earliest LaserJets. The latest is an all-in-one printer/fax/copier that we bought a few… Read more »
Ruby on Rails QuickStart Seminar Launched
During the dozen or so years I ran the Microprocessor Forum conference, I presented hundreds of seminars on microprocessors and PC technology. I enjoy… Read more »
Tracking the Cosco Busan
As you probably know, on Wednesday morning a 908-foot cargo ship, the Cosco Busan, ran into one of the San Francisco Bay Bridge towers,… Read more »
Accreditation Helper debuts
For the past several months, the majority of my time has gone into a web application for a startup called Accreditation Helper. The marketing… Read more »
Announcing BuildingWebApps.com
When I started this blog almost a year ago, I really wasn’t sure what I’d be writing about. As it happened, it ended up… Read more »
Creeping Success of Web Services
If my personal behavior is any indication, things are looking up for subscription web services. When I went out on my own last fall,… Read more »
Notes from RailsConf 2007
Update: some more presentations have been added to the conference site, most notably DHH’s keynote, titled “A peak at Rails 2.0”. (I’m not sure… Read more »
Web Applications for Service Businesses
Six months into my exploration of Ruby and Rails and the opportunities it represents, I’ve settled into a niche of building web applications that… Read more »
Easy text formatting with Textile
When I’m writing content for the web, I hate dealing with HTML coding. HTML is rather verbose as a markup language, and having to… Read more »
Building Community in the North Bay
I moved to the hills near Sebastopol, in Sonoma County about an hour north of San Francisco, almost 17 years ago. We came for… Read more »
Ruby vs. Blunt Scissors
One of the things that Ruby’s advocates find wonderful, and others often find scary, is its dynamic nature. You don’t declare the types of… Read more »
New Rails Site is Live
My first built-from-scratch Ruby on Rails site is now live: www.newhorizonschool.info. This site is for New Horizon School and Learning Center, a wonderful small… Read more »
Great Free Web Developer Tools
Having recently left a five-year stint at Adobe, I became accustomed to the world of expensive software. Now that I’m doing web development on… Read more »
Making Tagging More Useful
Tagging has become one of the themes of so-called Web 2.0 sites. Really nothing more than free-form keywording, tagging has proven useful in many… Read more »
Better Photo Sharing Solutions
Photo sharing has proven to be one of the Internet’s most common applications. Indeed, the ability to easily share photos electronically is a key… Read more »
Adobe open sources Flash gallery code
One of the projects I led at Adobe during the past year was the development of a new generation of web photo galleries to… Read more »
Inspirations: The Cluetrain Manifesto
Somehow I never got to reading The Cluetrain Manifesto until recently. I’m stunned at how insightful this work is. It illuminates an awful lot… Read more »
Sites built with Ruby on Rails
Update: I published this quick list some time ago, and I’ve noticed it continues to get a fair amount of traffic. It is woefully… Read more »
A brief intro to Ruby on Rails
I’m currently at the Rails Edge conference, an interesting gathering of about 100 Ruby on Rails aficionados, newbies, and everything in between, in Denver…. Read more »
Hosted applications for small businesses
As I’ve been exploring what kind of business I want to build, I’ve found my thinking settling on hosted applications for small business. Here’s… Read more »
The trouble with hosted apps
A central presumption behind hosted applications is that Internet connectivity is becoming universal. There are some obvious problems with this presumption, such as when… Read more »
Almost done with Outlook
I’ve been using Outlook for a long time, for email, calendar, contacts, and notes. (I realize this may immediately lower your estimation of me,… Read more »
Changing to hosted solutions
For more than 10 years, I’ve arranged my computing around a single notebook PC that went with me everywhere. With docks, monitors, and keyboards… Read more »