Delicious Links – 19 links – tips, google, music, code, blogging

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
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- [BLOGGING] The Benefits of Keeping a Private Journal, doshdosh.com
- Brilliant tip and way to keep mindful of your goals.
- [BLOGGING] What’s it Like to Run a Popular Blog?, skelliewag.org
- Skelliewag talks about her meteoric success and what’s different about having 3500 readers vs the 100 or so she had just a few short months ago.
- [BOOKS] Inside Google Book Search: Your library, my library, booksearch.blogspot.com
- You can keep track of the books you’ve read with Google library, and limit your book searches to only the books you’ve already read.
- [CODE] Programmers At Work, programmersatwork.wordpress.com
- New website about the 1980′s book.
- [COMICS] Rampant Plagiarism, mightygodking.com, via:io9.com
- The rampant plagiarism of the comics industry is revealed!
- [FRIENDFEED] 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed, blogoscoped.com
- Some quick tips for the new service that everyone’s blogging about.
- [GMAIL] Gmail Tips and Tricks – 35 Cool Gmail Hacks, botw.org, via:doshdosh.com
- Yes, we’ve seen a lot of them before. But a good collection.
- [GOOGLE] The Real Story: Why ComScore’s Google Clicks are Flat, seoblackhat.com
- Google Adsense changes are why adclicks are down. Buy Google stock because the market is full of idiots.
- [HUMOR] Mobile Desktop, improveverywhere.com, via:codinghorror.com
- Improv Everywhere brings their desktop computers to Starbucks.
- [HUMOR] Stuff White People Like, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, via:gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
- Recursion at its best. White people like Stuff White People Like.
- [LASTFM] Build Last.fm: Extend your Last.fm experience, build.last.fm, via:del.icio.us
- Last.FM is promoting community created tools that use the service.
- [LIFEHACKS] Your Brain Is In 10 Kinds of Trouble, secretgeek.net
- No solutions, but a discussion of the information overload we’re all experiencing.
- [MUSIC] The Filter Releases New Version of Music Recommendation Software, readwriteweb.com
- Playlist generator from your iTunes library
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] FriendFeed Changelog, changelog.friendfeed.com
- wth? A web app that publishes its new features via it’s version control changelog.Brilliant.
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize, wired.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Interview with the guy who is building a better recommendation engine using psychology instead of math.
- [SOFTWARE] Rethinking Recommendation Engines, readwriteweb.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Damn good point in this one. The human psychology behind recommendations is what makes recommendations fail. Instead of telling use what we like, just remove what we’re NOT going to like.
- [TWITTER] Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls, russellbeattie.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- From the article: ” Twitter, however, has almost a million members, a thriving community, lots of discussions and yet doesn’t have spam or troll issues. If you step back for a second and think about it, that’s pretty amazing.”
- [WORDPRESS] Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP, geeksaresexy.blogspot.com
- I don’t know why I never did this before.
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This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- How to Explain RSS to Normal People – 2008 Edition
- As a geek who enjoys spending too much time on the internet, I like RSS almost as much as delicious toast. As a blogger, RSS is the shiznitz because it lets you consume a lot more information and it makes it easier for other people to read your blog without having to drop by every few days to see if…
- I Can Has Ruby?
- I have a new tumblelog for ruby stuff.
- How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr
- There’s one feature missing on Tumblr: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every individual…
- Delicious Links – 13 links – programming, lifehacks, productivity, geek, games
This Week at IDT Labs
IDT Labs is where I announce new software tools I’m working on.
- [TUMBLR] Regular Post Digest of the Last X Days
- Build a list of the last X regular posts from your Tumblr account in the past Y days. Useful for doing weekly digest posts with Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
- [TUMBLR] Delete your Tumblr with TumblrCleanr 0.0.1
- There’s one Tumblr feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every…
This Week at Ruby, eh?
Ruby, eh? is where I blog/tumble about the Ruby programming language.
- Rake RDocTask with all of the options stubbed out
- http://pastie.caboo.se/159372 Rake::RDocTask.new(:rdoc) do |rd| # rd.external # run the rdoc process as an external shell # rd.main = “name” # ‘name’ will be the initial page displayed # rd.rdoc_dir = “html” # set the output directory # rd.rdoc_file = [] # List of files…
- Rake: Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file
- There’s probably an easier way to do this. http://pastie.caboo.se/159362 # Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file def local_requires(source) results = [] File.open(source,’r').each_line do |line| if line =~ /require ['"]([^'"]+)['"]/…
- I Can Has RSS?I’ve switched to FeedBurner for RSS support . And set up full feeds, thanks to Alex . (I had no idea that they were turned off!)
- Bulk updating Gem sourcegem install allison Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org I swear to god that rubyforge is actually a humongous peer to peer network made up from stealing our bandwidth when we do a gem install.
- Rake Tip: force tasks to run based on operating systemhttp://pastie.caboo.se/158812 task :windows_only do raise “Must be run from Windows, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin/ end task :linux_only do raise “Must be run from Linux, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /linux/ end
- Rake TipBAD: s.gsub(/.rb$/,’.exe’) GOOD: File.basename(s).ext(‘exe’)
- Rails: how to delete ActiveRecords to a recycling bin
- The contenders: acts_as_paranoid – 2005-09-17 Creates a delete_at column and overrides finders to ignore columns with deleted_at set. Last release was 2005-12-20, about 1600 downloads. Around ~100 blog mentions. This guy is using it instead of acts_as_trashable Reported not working on…
- validates_presence_of and validates_length_of
- Pick one : validates_presence_of :snausages validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3 OR validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3, :allow_nil => true I broke my app because of not including allow_nil grep validates_length_of app/models/*.rb | grep -v allow_nil // engtech …

[...] be missing a core – and maybe the most important – feature of Twitter: No spam or trolls. Thanks to engtech for the link. Russell is right that this feature is remarkable, given that Twitter has a million [...]