Constantly impressed with what I find in the Sites page on the Jekyll wiki (and my inbox).
The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard is a fantastic foundation for designing a website. Wishing I read this earlier.
Having frequented IRC since 1999, I’ve always been disappointed with existing quote submission applications for their ugliness. Itching to try out Sinatra, Sequel and jQuery I started (re)writing Quotes last coding night.
From the code, to the design and ultimately the user experience; the objective of Quotes was to be simple. I wanted users to receive immediate feedback for any action that’s performed. I want quotes to be so pretty that you’d scroll up and down the page a couple of times.
It has a tiny footprint. There’s only three models, a few actions and a couple of views. Without caching it’s still fast to load on a resource limited environment, such as DreamHost. Sinatra was a perfect match for this tiny project.
Code is on GitHub and you can view a live example of the application. Thanks to #lolbot on irc.freenode.com for the motivation, Ashley Kyd for the concept and Pascal Klein for the initial design.
Earlier I wrote about using Git and its post-receive hooks for deployment. After using this configuration for six months, I’ve concluded that it’s unnecessarily complicated for my requirements. Scott Kyle and Ben Vinegar agree.
Using such a configuration makes perfect sense for projects residing on GitHub. The repository already exists, and it’s a complimentary service that you don’t have to configure.
In future, when someone asks me how they should deploy Jekyll, I will recommend using a Rakefile and rsync.
$ rake deploy
Thanks to Scott Kyle for sharing his Rakefile.
Wolfgang König brought to my attention that you can exclude files from being copied in the build using the exclude option. I’ve appended this to _config.yml.
exclude: ['Rakefile', 'README.markdown']
You can browse the entire United States 2009 collection on Flickr.
Even though english is the de facto language of the United States and Australia, I’ve always been interested in the subtle differences of slang between other english speaking countries.
While in the United States, I compiled a list of common words or phrases which were unknown to me, even with exposure to American media.
| United States | Australia | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Sandwich | Burger | Extra melted cheese on my sandwhich |
| Grill | Barbecue | Throw a steak on the grill |
| Pitcher | Jug | I’ll have a pitcher of beer |
| The check | The bill | Could we have the check for the table? |
| To-go | Take-away | A smoothie to-go, please |
| Single | One dollar | Do you have a single? |
| Elevator | Lift | Elevator doors are closing, quick! |
This list does not attempt to be a comprehensive or accurate comparison.
Tate Johnson is a 23 year old Ruby on Rails developer and university student living in Brisbane, Australia. He enjoys riding bicycles, motorbikes, taking photos and travelling.