Tonight's Project: Write a Twitter Live-Blog Listener

June 16, 2010 by Eric Richardson

For several years I've wanted a little piece of server glue to take tweets and turn them into a story on blogdowntown. Something for those times when I'm out on scene and really just have the phone to work with to let people know what's going on.

This evening I'm sitting down to write that piece of glue. Basically, it needs to be a daemon that connects to our Ruby on Rails application on one side and to twitter on the other. It should listen to blogdowntown's twitter account(s) and recognize certain commands that trigger live blogging. — Continue Reading...

silence again

June 16, 2010 by Eric Richardson

Sorry about that... It's been a very quick four months since that last post. I'll see if I can do a little better over the next four.

Me and my browsers

February 17, 2010 by Eric Richardson

On December 27, 1998,, I decided to check out "Gecko" as a replacement to Netscape Communicator. I liked it.

A touch over 11 years later, my browser situation is less clear. I'm using -- and liking -- Google Chrome as my day-to-day browser, but am stuck with different situations that mean I'm required to use Chrome, Firefox and Safari in any given day. That's less than optimal. — Continue Reading...

Making Life with Facebook Connect Easier

February 11, 2010 by Eric Richardson

I implemented Facebook Connect on blogdowntown in December of 2008 and have pretty much had a love-hate relationship with it ever since. The functionality is great, but the facebook Javascript has consistently been the slowest loading piece of the site.

Today I deployed a code update that moves the site over to Facebook's new open-source connect-js library. It's alpha, it's incomplete, but boy does it feel better to use. — Continue Reading...

Untangling that stylish mess

February 09, 2010 by Eric Richardson

It's amazing how crufty a CSS file can get over time.

I went through blogdowntown main CSS file this evening looking for code that was no longer used on the site. I ended up cutting the file down roughly 250 lines, or 14%.

At the same time I ported the stylesheet over to LESS, a CSS processor that allows you to use fun things like variables and nesting that really should be in the CSS spec itself. — Continue Reading...