I had tried earlier to auto-import Tumblr feeds into Wordpress via the Tumblr rss, but without satisfying results.

This blogpost describes a workable procedure to have Tumblr's competitor, Posterous, autopost to Wordpress.

Combined with Posterous' many ways of posting using email (see http://howdoi.posterous.com/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-posting-by-email ), posting to Wordpress by emailing to Posterous will probably be a way to get blogging again...

Posting by mailing to Wordpress directly requires a separate mailaccount and this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/ that superseeds the poor built in post-via-email Wordpress functionality.

Alternative to Cancan

"Authority helps you authorize actions in your Rails app. It's ORM-neutral and has very little fancy syntax; just group your models under one or more Authorizer classes and write plain Ruby methods on them.

Authority will work fine with a standalone app or a single sign-on system. You can check roles in a database or permissions in a YAML file. It doesn't care! What it does do is give you an easy way to organize your logic and handle unauthorized actions.

It requires that you already have some kind of user object in your application, accessible from all controllers and views via a method like current_user (configurable)."

Shell script (fox Mac OSX or Linux) to install IE6/7/8/9 in the appropriate Windows Virtualbox image.

Funny to see a blog post from 2006 explaining how Amazon designs their entire business processes outside-in or "backwards" as they call it.

"Refinery breaks its components into individual engines and we can pick and choose which engines we want in our application. Refineries authentication engine uses devise however we want to have complete control over Devise in our Rails application.
List of Engines:

Authentication
Core
Dashboard
Images
Pages
Resources

In order to integrate Refinery with your application we will specifically include all the the Refinery engines EXCEPT the Authentication engine"

Excellent guide by Iain Hecker on how to set up your own rails backend.

"plugin for Ruby on Rails that generates diagrams based on your Active Record models"

Paper voting system with randomized order of candidates and a cryptographically linked QRcode.

Voter separates vote and tracking part so he/she can afterwards track his/her vote.

Via this TED talk: http://evoting.bismark.se/2010/07/21/my-ted-global-talk/

CoffeeScript Style Guide: "community-driven, heavily inspired by several existing style guides and other resources"

Just like RefineryCMS, it makes the claim that it adds cms capabilities to existing apps.
Looks more like a tool for developers to maintain otherwise static content in a Rails app, rather than an end-user-facing CMS...

All about using and maintaining gemsets (collections of ruby libraries) in a project.

Create your own (Android) location/movement/whatever-sensor app that pushes your data into your Dropbox/Evernote/Gmail.

From MIT

Open sourced code of http://copycopter.com/ , now defunct service helping to translate copy of Rails apps.

Setup instructions:
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/19388751626/copycopter-is-now-open-source

Fixes badly-encoded strings, e.g. café → café

Helps you write Markdown by displaying the rendered html on the right side.

Features: Syntax highlighting, live preview, fullscreen mode, auto save, powerful actions, auto pair, incremental search, custom themes, HTML export, enhanced CJK characters support

At first sight ugly inferface, but quite handy.
Search earlier versions of Rails at their appropriate url:

http://railsapi.com/doc/rails-v2.3.8_ruby-v1.9.2/

(mind the ruby version in the url)

Is a good alternative to http://api.rubyonrails.org/v2.3.8/ which is not searchable.

(Free) Mac equivalent to (Windows) AutoHotkey

"by hard-coding Bootstrap's class names into your HTML, you're marrying your code to Bootstrap. Bootstrap's very name should indicate that developers should consider it a starter library: something to get you out the gate faster, not your permanent design solution."

The solution:

"Like Sass and SCSS, Less provides mixins, meaning that if you write your stylesheets in Less rather than CSS, you can include the Bootstrap classes in your stylesheet rather than in your HTML."

Take and build online courses.

Similar to:

http://www.tutorom.com/
http://p2pu.org/en/
http://traindom.com/
http://www.prfessor.com/

Visualises code execution, nice!

short guide to setting up multiple profiles for Google Chrome on Mac OSX.

"meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities. "

Technical writeup by Jonathan Mayer, of Do-Not-Track fame on the Apple-Google 3d party cooking kerfuffle.

"CloudCracker, a general-purpose cloud-based password cracking service, complete with an API"
"password cracking service for penetration testers and network auditors who need to check the security of WPA2-PSK protected wireless networks, crack password hashes, or break document encryption. "

NullDB is the Null Object pattern as applied to ActiveRecord database adapters. It is a database backend that translates database interactions into no-ops. Using NullDB enables you to test your model business logic - including after_save hooks - without ever touching a real database.

Limitations
- It is not an in-memory database. Finds will not work. Neither will reload, currently. Test fixtures won’t work either, for obvious reasons.
- It has only the most rudimentery schema/migration support. Complex migrations will probably break it.
- Lots of other things probably don’t work. Patches welcome!

Differences between BrowserID and OpenID:

- BrowserID uses email addresses to identify users
- BrowserID protects the privacy of your Web activity
- BrowserID can be smoothly integrated into the browser

"This post aims to provide a readable technical overview of the system. First it will summarize the key design elements of BrowserID. Next, it will explore the various actors in the system and their inter-relationships. Finally, we'll walk through several of the most important flows, including certificate provisioning (where the user obtains authentication material from an identity provider), assertion generation (where the user uses that material to tell a website who they are), and assertion verification (where the website being logged into verifies the user's email address)."

Just a bunch of icons linking to to permissions pages of facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin, Dropbox etc...

"overview of scss for beginners. inspiration for code structure too."

Used links: https://gist.github.com/1344243

Over de (Belgische implementatie van) de EU richtlijn die afluisteren van communicatie strafbaar maakt, en hoe online services en social media in het bijzonder zich daarbij in een grijze zone bevinden.

- create a new profile using the firefox profile manager
- save in the Apple Script Editor:

do shell script "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P profileName"

- save it as "Application" in the "Applications folder" with an appropriate name, e.g. "profileName-FF"

Your shortcut is now findable in spotlight as "profileName-FF"

Linux version of the 37 signal zero-config local development server: github.com/37signals/pow/

""CoffeeScript, Meet Backbone.js is a simple Backbone.js tutorial written in CoffeeScript comprised of self-explanatory "hello world" examples of increasing complexity. It was designed to provide a smoother transition from zero to the popular Todos example The bulk of this tutorial is a rewrite of the original hello-backbonejs tutorial.

Backbone.js offers a lean MVC framework for organizing your Javascript application. It leads to more maintainable code by untangling the "spaghetti" of callbacks tied to different parts of the DOM and the backend server that often arises in rich client-side applications.

The tutorial starts with a minimalist View object, and progressively introduces event binding/handling, Models, and Collections.

Once in the tutorial, use the navigation menu in the top-right corner to view other examples. Example numbers are in order of increasing complexity.

Adding your own css classes to the Bootstrap mixins and have Rails Asses pipeline compile it for you.

"extension to the Twitter Bootstrap framework. It makes creating pretty (css) buttons easy."

Another crowdsourcing startup by Luis von Ahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn .

Learn languages by translating texts - thus improving translation computer algorithms.

"simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented"

""For this system to work, you first need to declare a public API. This may consist of documentation or be enforced by the code itself. Regardless, it is important that this API be clear and precise. Once you identify your public API, you communicate changes to it with specific increments to your version number. Consider a version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch). Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version.

Old text by Verisign, intro on Digital certificates.
Companion text: intro to PKI at http://www.verisign.com.au/repository/tutorial/cryptography/intro1.shtml

CSS snippet to both horizontally and vertically align a div on the screen.

Ruby gem that lets you roll out features gradually over groups of users so you can first test new features on a small subgroup of users first (possibly identified als early adopters?).

"Test-First Teaching provides a fundamental shift in the way people learn software development. Initially, it helps the student focus on learning very basic syntax, able to independently confirm when they have successfully completed an exercise. That immediate feedback is valuable for cementing knowledge.

Test-first teaching also teaches an understanding of all of the arcane error messages in a low stress situation. The first thing you see, before you have written a line of code, is an error. Then you discover what you need to do to fix that error. Test-first teaching helps people intuitively understand that mistakes are a natural part of the software development process."

HTML5 fact sheet (availability on different browsers) and implementation advice

"A website storing a password in plain text means that your password is there, waiting for someone to come and take it. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve created the strongest possible password. It’s just there.

Whether it’s someone hacking into their servers, using a simple flaw in their site or even stealing their backups, over 30% of sites store plain text passwords.

We’re tired of websites abusing our trust and storing our passwords in plain text, exposing us to danger. Here we put websites we believe to be practicing this to shame."

"CV Dazzle™ is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

Because face detection is the first step in automated facial recognition, CV Dazzle can be used in any environment where automated face recognition systems are in use, such as Google's Picasa, Flickr, or Facebook"

Pivotaltracker seems to be the favourite tool of startups. However it is not much more than a user story management tool helping you to communicate with the customer/stakeholder and prioritizing your stories. Lacks real project management tools such us time, progress, dependency tracking etc...

"Bring everyone, even distributed teams into the same virtual room. Enable a more efficient way to agree on priorities and stay aligned with the entire team.

Stay on target with Tracker's continuous, automatic prediction of milestone completion dates, based on your team's performance.

Get the right product to the market sooner, based on continuous feedback and prioritization. Respond to changing needs and new requirements easily."

Alternative to PivotalTracker?

" Set up your own process, or just use Scrum or Kanban out of the box. Quick and Simple!
Help Desk is about keeping your customers happy. Create Stories or Bugs from customers' emails and always keep them in the loop.

Add Test Cases and Bugs to User Stories, run Test Plans
and ship truly quality software.
Built-in Plugins Framework, REST API and Integrations with Subversion, JIRA, Bugzilla, Selenium.
"

"metrics like pageviews ... don’t impact your bottom line.

... those metrics are called vanity metrics, because they simply give you a brief, warm-and-fuzzy feeling. However, the sobering reality is that vanity metrics aren’t important to your business.

Relevant customer metrics:

Metric #1: Lifetime Value
Metric #2: Events
Metric #3: Cohorts
Metric #4: Marketing Attribution
Metric #5: People"

“Search Plus Your World” is not a privacy issue in itself (you cannot search for anything you could not already search for) but it is a user experience misstep because it messes up the user's perception of what is public and what is private.

Web interfaces should either be "turned inwards" (being personal tools, only available after logging in) or "public-facing" (available to anyone on the public internet). Google keeps piercing the membrane between those two worlds and causing user discomfort.

"LASER is a tool to analyze the lexical structure and semantic meaning of your Ruby programs. It will be able to discover bugs that Ruby only encounters at run-time, and it can discover properties about your code that no pre-existing tools can, such as whether a given block of code raises, which methods are private, if a method call could require a block, and so on. It provides warnings as well as errors for potentially error-prone code"

"So, you want to develop Ruby on Rails applications? While loads of (introductory) tutorials are available for developing Ruby on Rails applications, there seems to be some uncertainty about setting up a lean and up-to-date local development environment.

This tutorial will guide you through the steps of setting up an Ubuntu local development machine for Ruby on Rails. "

"Ruby and Rails setup script for Linux and OSX
Distros supported:

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10 and 11.04
CentOS 5 (utilizes the Fedora EPEL repo)
OSX (requires XCode to be installed)"

"Helps you" construct (and thus test) XSS and CLI attacks on a website.

("Know your enemy!")

git config branch.autosetuprebase always

"in the normal case of having your local branch simply reflecting the upstream branch and doing continuous development on it, the right thing to do is always "--rebase" because that is what you are semantically actually doing. You and others are hacking away at the intended linear history of a branch. The fact that someone else happened to push slightly prior to your attempted push is irrelevant, and it seems counter-productive for each such accident of timing to result in merges in the history.

[...]

Please consider other people that need to observe and understand the history of your project. Do you want the history littered with hundreds of merges all over the place, or do you want only the select few merges that represent real merges of intentional divergent development efforts?"

Another Git introduction - arguing to use rebase over merge with git-flow

git flow feature rebase
git flow feature finish 77-speedup-yak-shaving

Step-by-step install guide - what it says.

"background, structure and benefits for various [identity management] solutions":

SAML
OpenID
OAuth
WS-Trust
SCIM

Viddler has been around for a long time (used to have video comments as distinguishing feature), but it looks like they have pivoted to a whitelabel video hosting platform.

pdfsam is an open source tool (GPL license) designed to handle pdf files. Not a pdf editor: just handles pages as a whole (split, merge, rotate, add, delete)

Itě°˝€™s released in 2 versions, basic and enhanced.

"there are two major elements to ActiveModel. The first is the ActiveModel API, the interface that models must adhere to in order to gain compatibility with ActionPack’s helpers. I’ll be talking more about that soon, but for now, the important thing about the ActiveModel API is that your models can become ActiveModel compliant without using a single line of Rails code."

Yes, you can use your old plain Ruby classes in Rails:

"If you have concepts that don't fit neatly into those boxes (persistence, request/response management), you probably want to think about how you would model the idea in question. You can store non-model classes in app/classes, or anywhere else, and add that directory to your load path by doing:

config.load_paths << File.join(Rails.root, "app", "classes")
"

Screencast that discusses gitflow in the context of development and release management in general.

Screencast that covers all: feature, release and hotfix branches.

Simple introduction to Gitflow ( http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ )

"collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools"
"Anyone can contribute to a manual – to fix a spelling mistake, to add a more detailed explanation, to write a new chapter, or to start a whole new manual on a topic. "

Bitcoin being declared dead by Wired, mainly for 2 reasons:

"Even the purest technology has to live in an impure world. Both the code and the idea of bitcoin may have been impregnable, but bitcoins themselves—unique strings of numbers that constitute units of the currency—are discrete pieces of information that have to be stored somewhere. "

"Stefan Brands, a former ecash consultant and digital currency pioneer, calls bitcoin “clever” and is loath to bash it but believes it’s fundamentally structured like “a pyramid scheme” that rewards early adopters. “I think the big problems are ultimately the trust issues,” he says. “There’s nothing there to back it up. I know the counterargument, that that’s true of fiat money, too, but that’s completely wrong. There’s a whole trust fabric that’s been established through legal mechanisms.”"

Brilliant: the tool I wanted to build myself to keep track of Twitter favourites... Fetches link and creates an rss feed out of it so you can have its content in your feedreader without having to click through.

Impressive...
"jQuery plugin which detects faces in pictures and returns theirs coords. "

Might be the most promising open/decentralised data project so far. Started by Jeremie Miller, who was once involved in Jabber/xmpp.

(Web 2.0 talk announcing sing.ly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTNO5npNq28 )

Unclear to me yet whether this can really be used as a CRM for a web startup - or that it's just the umpteenth Social media monitoring tool?

"The Nimble contact record view allows you to see the contact's social stream and all of the pending and completed activities and communications that you or your team have done or need to do."

Textmining as-a-service (includes scraping/extraction/concept parsing/sentiment analysis/categorisation)

The ultimate test for your punditry: make a prediction now and have it published in ten years time....

Wondering whether this service will make it till 2021....

"Wil je snel weten wat je netto over zal houden als zzp'er? Bereken dan jouw besteedbaar inkomen via onderstaande calculator."

The blogpost that coined the concept "Open Coffee", used since by thousands of meetups around the world, and, as such, a historical document...

(Series of) Twitter Bootstrap tutorials, covering:

Grid system tutorial
Layout tutorial
Typography tutorial
Tables tutorial
Forms tutorial
Navigation tutorial
Alerts and Errors tutorial
Popover tutorial

"InfluAds is the only ad network led and curated by our publishers. Our ads are relevant, beautifully designed, and only available to quality audiences."

Remarkable: they play nice with Google and nofollow their links...

Twitter Bootstrap Tutorial, covering:

The Grid System
Typography
Tables
Forms and Buttons
Navigation
Tabs and Pills
Pagination
Alerts and Error Messages
Modals

Includes a sample webpage made entirely with Bootstrap

Gallery of Sites built with the css/js framework Boostrap. Has a Twitter account as well: https://twitter.com/#!/BWBootstrap

Recommended by a @robertgaal and @rickdronkers. Pay a flat fee/month, access unlimited content. Have hundreds of videos available on what seems to be state-of-the-are webdev and webdesign.

Interesting: survey of populist political opinions using Facebook fanpages + Facebook ad tool to calibrate demographics (see the methodology annex in the pdf)