I wanted to follow up on my previous post about dealing with blog spam.
I installed Akismet and it has worked flawlessly. It has caught dozens of blog spam posts so far. I have had no false positives and no false negatives yet (i.e. it has correctly identified every comment). The only downside is that for [...]

I assume that many of my readers are technical people and as such are likely to be bloggers themselves, so I post the question to you: How do you deal with blog spam?
I’m currently getting on the order of 30-40 blog spam posts a day. While WordPress does a good job of catching them, and [...]

Ajax is a web application development architecture that resembles more of a client-server architecture than traditional web development. In an Ajax application a client application is delivered to the browser consisting of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The interactions of the client with the server send and receive data, data that the client then knows how to display to the user.

As a hot technology, I was of course interested in learning more so I created a small example application using DOJO, JSON and PHP so that I could play with it a bit. I thought I’d share it with everyone so they could use it as a quick-start example for trying some of these technologies.

For the past year, I’ve been running Zorched.NET on a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Virtualization is not a new technology, IBM was doing it WAY back in the day. But recently it has become a lot more common as hardware has gotten so much more powerful. Why let hardware sit idle when you can run [...]

Firefox 2 is just around the corner. With the recent release of Firefox 2 RC2 I’ve started using it more. It has a number of new features that you can read about in the release notes. I’ve already written about JavaScript 1.7 which adds some cool new features for developers. Of course those will only [...]

I recently got a free copy of RJS Templates for Rails from the Milwaukee Ruby User’s Group. O’Reilly has a program that makes books available for free to Users Groups, which is a really nice thing (of course they bank on the word-of-mouth advertising that comes from it. Hi O’Reilly! <wave/>).
RJS Templates for Rails is [...]

Seek and ye shall find.
I posted yesterday about the trials and tribulations of code formatting. While I’ve solved the basic problems of displaying code, we spoiled programmers have gotten really used to syntax highlighting. Syntax highlighting offers a lot of visual differentiation of text which makes it a lot easer to read code.
Brennan posted a [...]

I finally got tired of dealing with reformatting that Wordpress does in its attempt to be “user friendly”. In general it does the right thing, but when you deal with code snipits inside <code> tags a lot it can quickly become a problem.

In just a few easy steps, the problems can be solved.

If Ruby on Rails is all about optimizing the development of web applications, then what would happen if you optimized Rails?
Well, it would get streamlined. Streamlined is a generator for Rails that can be used to easily create sites that are much better looking and much easier to use than the standard scaffold generated views. [...]

Brennan posted a blog entry about the Firefox 2.0 beta release a couple of days ago that talks about a lot of the new features in the next Firefox release. This version seems to be an evolutionary release and not a revolutionary one. A lot of work has gone on in the internals of the [...]