Who Moved My Cheese? The New WordPress Admin Interface

Two of my blogging heroes and inspiration Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have joined together on a new venture called StackOverflow: overflowing with awesomeness. They are also doing a weekly podcast, and you can download the first 45 minute podcast here (8 MB). In the discussion, Joel makes a great comment: Windows Vista gives you change without giving you any value. As a Windows XP user there is no compelling reason to upgrade because you’re going to have to relearn where everything is, but you don’t get any new and compelling features or applications to offset that.

Put a Copyright Notice in Your RSS Feed

As a blogger, your content is going to end up being stolen and republished on the Internet. It’s a fact of life, there’s nothing you can do about it.

One thing you can do however is put a copyright notice in your RSS feed with FeedBurner. (FeedBurner is the Google’s RSS publishing service).

Delete It – Tips for Managing Information Overload

We’re deep into the beginning of the Information Age, as you can see from the propagation of information aggregators like Google Reader and the meta-aggregators like Friend Feed. There’s only one tip for handling information saturation that has any success: delete it.

Friend Feed Scripts: Unsubscribe, Who Are You and Better By Service

It’s another week which means I have more Friend Feed scripts to share with you all.

Speed Up Outlook Express

I was investigation my dad’s computer trying to find out why it was so slow. There was the usual culprit of Norton Antivirus and Outlook Express. There’s nothing I can do about Norton, but he’s been using Outlook Express since 1998 and his mail folder is a whopping 5.8 GB. It’s time to perform my sonly duty and try to fix his slow computer, even though I haven’t used Outlook Express in the past ten years.

I’ll walk you through how I do it…

Battery Charged or Not

The problem: It’s 3am and the wireless mouse has run out of juice. Scrounging through the battery drawer shows 13 double-A’s, but none of them have a charge. Maybe they were charged at some point, but rechargeable batteries don’t hold their charge if they aren’t being used.

All rechargeable battery manufacturers love to boast about their product’s current capacity (mAh). But there is a dirty little secret that they don’t want you to hear: self-discharge rate. Simply put: a fully charged NiCd of NiMH cell will gradually lose its stored energy over time. Technical papers I have researched typically put the self-discharge rate at 10-20% per month for NiCd cells, and 20-30% per month for NiMH cells. This kind of self-discharge rate is usually acceptable in applications such as digital cameras. via: Jeff

The solution: A social website for keeping track of:

• how many batteries you have charged
• which brands you use
• which devices used charged batteries
• when you last changed the batteries
• Collect stats will recommend the best batteries available in your area
• Monetized by referrer micropayments from all the battery sales

It can even have a local component for finding people who have the same interest in rechargeable batteries as you!

Controlling Your Privacy

Today I tried out a new service by one of the smartest guys I know, Michael Geist. It’s called iOptOut and it’s a gateway for Canadians to voluntarily put themselves on do-not-call lists *before* the company contacts you, as well as giving you a legal recourse for when they call you anyways (those bastards). Within hours of signing up for the service I got 8 calls from 1-480-543-1171. Spooky coincidence.

Customer service representative indicated they worked for Fido. Trying to acquire different identification information, such as passport, drivers license, citizenship number, SIN number. Agent was rude the whole time and started asking if any of the information was fake.

They had the nerve to call us back again. Fido has confirmed they are not legitimate for selling Fido phone service. Ottawa Police (Canada) are now launching a fraud investigation. – Jeremy

(1-800 Notes is a great site for looking up the telemarketers before you give them any information — I’m glad I did)

Presenting: Livejournal Theme for WordPress

You know the story. You’ve been using LiveJournal since 1999. It’s your home. You’re familiar with it. You’re on the list of notable LiveJournal users. But times they be a changin’. You’re friends are all leaving LiveJournal for WordPress because it’s a better C-M-S (whatever that is). You’ve switched to WordPress, but everything looks strange and confusing.

Don’t worry, as usual engtech has your back.

Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Auto-Pagerization, Resharing Links and Even More

It’s the last day of my week of Friend Feed and I have 5 more Greasemonkey scripts for you (for a total of 8). I think I’m done writing scripts for Friend Feed for the next little while. I might put together something for importing your Twitter contacts as friends (update: here it is) but if I wait long enough I’m sure they’ll do it as an official service.

As usual you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey to use these scripts.

Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Twitter Client and Remove Visited Links

“Friend Feed” week seems to be continuing at IDT. But don’t worry, there’s a team of trained attack Bonobo monkeys prepared to take me into a dark alley and beat me up and make me suffer if I don’t stop talking about Friend Feed. What can I say? This is what it looks like when a web app gets people excited. I’ve put together two more Greasemonkey scripts to add features I want in Friend Feed.

Crunching the Friend Feed Stats to Find the Most Popular Web Apps

One of the nicest things about the Internet is that if you sit on your ass for long enough, someone will code up whatever little side project you’re thinking about starting. In my case, I was interested in finding out general statistics about Friend Feed as a tape measure of how popular certain social bookmarking sites are. Enter Friend Feed Stats. Thank you, lazyweb.

What Is the Most Popular Web Service?

How to Generate 100s of Backlinks in Minutes

In 25 ways to get an insanely popular blog Skellie describes 25 models for blogging that leads to an ever increasing audience. There’s one she missed out on: the abrasive model.

1. Say something bone-headed so people clamour to their keyboards in order to prove you wrong.
2. Make commenting on your post as hard as possible so that people will respond with blog posts of their own instead of a comment.

Greasemonkey Script: Filter FriendFeed by Service

I’ve sipped the Kool Aid and I’m really liking Friend Feed as a lifestreaming aggregator. One feature that is a bit hard to find is filtering by individual services. I’ve created a Greasemonkey script that sticks a huge bar of icons at the top of the page to make this accessible.

• It remembers the context you’re in.
  • If you’re browsing within friends, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on your friends.
  • If you’re browsing within a specific user, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on that person.
  • If you’re browsing the public timeline, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service for the public timeline.
• It returns 100 results per page instead of 30.
• It will automatically update itself if I update the script.

Let me know if you have any problems in the comments.

Free WP Plugin Idea: Use Referrers Instead of Trackbacks

Blogs have a way of keeping track of who is linking to them using trackbacks or pingbacks. It’s a good idea in theory because it helps you follow the discussion as it spreads to new areas, but in practice it is mostly filled with spam because getting a well-placed trackback on a popular website can be a good source of traffic.

Trackbacks were designed without any kind of authentication mechanism whatsoever, not even the most trivial test that the person who is says they are linking to you really is linking to you. So screw spammy trackbacks. Screw them in their naughty place. Take them out of your blog themes and blog engines and let’s build something better.

Here’s the idea: instead of showing a list of trackbacks for spammers to abuse, show a list of referrers.

The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

I’m a social web app junkie. Where most people use a few on a regular basis as a consumer and only a couple as a producer I am an active user on far too many sites. I’m not a beta junkie to the point where I try out every web service (especially not the ones spamming my blog contact email), but I do try out more than my fair share and manage to get involved before they reach the tipping point (like Friend Feed is reaching now).

The sheer amount of web apps out there leads to fragmentization of our online identities, but that isn’t a bad thing. The people who read my blog aren’t necessarily people I’m interested in talking to on Twitter, and none of us might share the same taste in music on Last.FM. For a while there I was talking about the Ruby programming language like crazy on this blog, but now I’m using a niche tumbleblog so that I can post more often on that specific technical subject without alienating my existing audience.

But it isn’t only our online identities that are fragmenting: it’s also the discussion around content. Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

Building an RSS Templating System

The blog posts might have been slow lately, but that’s only because there’s been an accumulation of interesting projects piling up on my hard drive. Here’s a few things that are in the pipe (which I’m talking about to stop my procrastination and force me to release them):

• Sandbox Theme for Tumblr so that you can use Sandbox CSS themes on tumblr.com
• Tumblr Theme Templates to make it easier to develop themes for tumblr.com without having to upload your theme to tumblr.com
• Tumblr automatic backup + restore
• WordPress.com automatic backup
• Twitter There Will Be Followers – program to automatically follow back anyone who is following you on Twitter
• PostMaster html2blog – automatically post formatted HTML to Tumblr, Blogger or WordPress
• rss2html – powerful templating system for converting an RSS feed into HTML

It’s the last one I want to talk about. I’ve gotten tired of using Yahoo Pipes + Pipe Cleaner to build digest posts. It’s kind of a pain in the butt. So I want something that can take an rss feed, convert it to html so that I can use another program for automatically posting it to the blog. I’m not going the plugin route because of WordPress.com’s inability to support javascript or PHP plugins.

This is what I’ve come up with.

Delicious Links – 20 links – tools, gamers, workhacks, code, links

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.

Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

• [BITTORRENT] Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations, torrentfreak.com, via:l33t.reddit.com
  • Pretty cool. Then when from 20 servers and 4 days to update clients to 2 servers and 4 hours to update clients.
  • (bittorrent, 15 saves, 22 inbound links, diggs)
• [BLOGGING] 17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You, informationweek.com, via:doshdosh.com
  • This should be titled “WELCOME TO THE INTERNETS”. Mandatory reading for understanding linking. It gets bonus points because the article doesn’t follow its own rules.
  • (blogging, tips, Linkbait, links, 54 inbound links)
• [CODE] insomnia and productivity, sob.apotheon.org
  • hack mode
  • (code, programming, 2 saves, 3 inbound links)
• [FRIENDFEED] Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves, louisgray.com
  • List of tech bloggers who are on friendfeed
  • (friendfeed, blogging, lifestreaming, 15 saves, 50 inbound links, 2 diggs)
• [GAMERS] Animal Crossing Is Tragic, animalcrossingtragedy.ytmnd.com
  • Sad little tale of a gamer who shared Animal Crossing with his/her dying mother.
  • (animalcrossing, gamers, 15 saves, diggs)
• [GAMERS] The Co-op Gaming Bill of Rights, ozymandias.com
  • Co-op gaming can be a ghetto on a lot of platforms. I’d love for more games to adopt these.
  • (gamers, xbox360, 2 saves, 12 inbound links, 4 diggs)
• [GAMERS] Warlords Online, warlords-online.com, via:lazycoder.com
  • Online MPORG based on Puzzle Quest
  • (gamers, puzzlequest, 15 saves, 2 inbound links)
• [LINKS] Ten Sites for Finding Wonderful Things, readwriteweb.com, via:twitter.com
  • Some suggestions for ‘best of the weird web’
  • (links, fun, 15 saves, 20 inbound links, 649 diggs)
• [OPENID] Zero Sign On – 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On?, drnicwilliams.com
  • How to use OpenID certificates so that you NEVER have to log in to any site that supports OpenID.
  • (openid, authentication, certificates, firefox, 15 saves, 47 inbound links, 7 diggs)
• [TECH] The real reason I left my career in tech, backinskinnyjeans.com
  • What women have to deal with being in the hightech workplace
  • (tech, women, 8 saves, 10 inbound links, 34 diggs)
• [TWITTER] 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe, flowingdata.com
  • Some cool examples of visualizing data
  • (twitter, visualization, tools, 15 saves, 94 inbound links, 12 diggs)
• [TWITTER] Need help managing your Twitter Karma?, dossy.org, via:experiencecurve.com
  • Something I’ve been complaining about. A better Twitter followers manager. Needs more info about the followees though.
  • (twitter, mashup, 15 saves, 10 inbound links, 185 diggs)
• [WEBDESIGN] 20 Websites That Made Me A Better Web Developer, sixrevisions.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
  • List of webdesign related websites. Most are familiar.
  • (webdesign, development, design, 15 saves, 65 inbound links, 3621 diggs)
• [WEBDESIGN] Administrative Debris, tomayko.com
  • Content is everything… then why do we display so much stuff that isn’t content?
  • (design, tufte, usability, 15 saves, 8 inbound links)
• [WEBDESIGN] IE App Compat VHD, microsoft.com
  • Virtual machine images of different versions of Internet Explorer so that you can test a website on multiple versions of the same web browser.
  • (windows, virtualization, testing, 3 saves, 100 inbound links)
• [WEBHACKS] Down for everyone or just me?, downforeveryoneorjustme.com
  • Find out if a website is unreachable for the entire net or just your machine
  • (tools, internet, network, 15 saves, 100 inbound links, 8 diggs)
• [WEBSAVVY] the Awesome Highlighter – be nice, highlight, awesomehighlighter.com
  • note to my parents: please use this all the time so I have some clue why you sent me that web page in an email.
  • (tools, highlighter, web2.0, sharing, 15 saves, 100 inbound links, 29 diggs)
• [WORKHACKS] 10 Ways to Improve Your Programming Productivity, matthewpaulmoore.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
  • Good advice, even if none of is groundbreaking.
  • (advice, workhacks, code, programming, 15 saves, 28 inbound links, 5 diggs)
• [WORKHACKS] 9 Simple Strategies to Getting Things Done At Work, lyved.com
  • Tricks for being more productive in the office
  • (productivity, lifehacks, workhacks, 15 saves, 12 inbound links, 679 diggs)
• Powered by Delicious Links Pro

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

•   Delicious Links – 17 links – programming, stumbleupon, blogging, windows, copyright

   

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

•   [DELICIOUS/STUMBLEUPON] Delicious Stumbles v2.0
  StumbleUpon upgraded their interface last nice so that means you get a new version of Delicious Stumbles.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

• Installing ruby-prof as a plugin on Rails 1.2
• rails/mysql: Load your production database on to your development server
• How not to replace WEBrick with Thin

Tags: blogging, code, design, gamers, links, programming, tools, twitter, workhacks

Searching for the Perfect Inline Code Documentation Tool

Even amongst programmers I’m weird because I have an intense love for documentation. No, that doesn’t mean I overly comment my code, or that you’ll catch me browsing happily through the product requirements document during my coffee break. I should be more specific.

I have an intense love automatic documentation generation. Nothing makes me more tickled pink than seeing code and documentation living side by side in perfect harmony. I hate seeing documentation put on the company intranet only to diverge from the code it’s supposed to explain as the days go past. I hate hitting my head against a brick wall as I’m pouring through the source code trying to understand an API because at no point does it mention that it’s documented in a Word doc in another directory.

This is my rule of programming: documentation should live beside the code it documents, in the comments, especially if it’s API documentation. If your language of choice doesn’t already have some kind of automatic code generation tool then you’re probably using the wrong language.

Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM

I’ve often said that one of the qualities of the hardcore geeky is that we have needs that sane normal people don’t have. That’s why there are so many web startups focused on RSS when most people don’t have a clue what RSS is — the geeks don’t realize that their need to have a continuous stream of information and never miss an update from a site they are interested in isn’t the way a lot of people use the internet.

One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music.

I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).

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.

Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

• [BLOGGING] The Benefits of Keeping a Private Journal, doshdosh.com
  • Brilliant tip and way to keep mindful of your goals.
  • (blogging, 7 saves, 20 inbound links)
• [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.
  • (blogging, success, tips, 7 saves, 9 inbound links, 3 diggs)
• [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.
  • (google, library, books, 2 saves, 13 inbound links)
• [CODE] Programmers At Work, programmersatwork.wordpress.com
  • New website about the 1980′s book.
  • (code, 26 saves, 11 inbound links)
• [COMICS] Rampant Plagiarism, mightygodking.com, via:io9.com
  • The rampant plagiarism of the comics industry is revealed!
  • (comics, photoshop, 12 saves, 22 inbound links)
• [FRIENDFEED] 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed, blogoscoped.com
  • Some quick tips for the new service that everyone’s blogging about.
  • (friendfeed, tips, socialnetworking, 35 saves, 19 inbound links, 2 diggs)
• [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.
  • (gmail, tips, lifehacks, 368 saves, 15 inbound links, 67 diggs)
• [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.
  • (google, 11 saves, 26 inbound links, 3 diggs)
• [HUMOR] Mobile Desktop, improveverywhere.com, via:codinghorror.com
  • Improv Everywhere brings their desktop computers to Starbucks.
  • (humor, geek, 130 saves, 100 inbound links, 3059 diggs)
• [HUMOR] Stuff White People Like, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, via:gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
  • Recursion at its best. White people like Stuff White People Like.
  • (funny, humour, 2364 saves, 100 inbound links, 104 diggs)
• [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.
  • (last.fm, music, tools, mashup, 386 saves, 82 inbound links, 17 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] Your Brain Is In 10 Kinds of Trouble, secretgeek.net
  • No solutions, but a discussion of the information overload we’re all experiencing.
  • (productivity, overload, 12 saves, 10 inbound links)
• [MUSIC] The Filter Releases New Version of Music Recommendation Software, readwriteweb.com
  • Playlist generator from your iTunes library
  • (itunes, LastFM, music, mp3, 17 saves, 3 inbound links, 27 diggs)
• [SOCIALSOFTWARE] FriendFeed Changelog, changelog.friendfeed.com
  • wth? A web app that publishes its new features via it’s version control changelog.Brilliant.
  • (friendfeed, transparency, code, socialsoftware, 16 saves, 8 inbound links)
• [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.
  • (psychology, algorithm, netflix, datamining, 71 saves, 35 inbound links, 7 diggs)
• [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.
  • (recommendations, personalization, 135 saves, 35 inbound links, 6 diggs)
• [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.”
  • (twitter, community, spam, 80 saves, 51 inbound links)
• [WORDPRESS] Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP, geeksaresexy.blogspot.com
  • I don’t know why I never did this before.
  • (wordpress, windows, 361 saves, 92 inbound links, 7 diggs)
• Powered by Delicious Links Pro

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  …

Tags: blogging, code, friendfeed, google, music, tips