Categories: ruby, functional-programming, twitter, blog, writing
Apparently I still have a ways to go in terms of getting things done. Nearly two months into the year, and I have one post here. That’s pitiful, but I’m going to skip the boring bit where I rake myself over the coals. This post itself will be mostly “recently seen” items. As you can imagine, it’s mostly just an attempt to kick-start the process.
Just a few Ruby-related items from around the web:
I don’t remember how I came across this, but Tim Maly wrote a recent manifesto, urging people to unlink their feeds. What’s his complaint? By relinking and reposting all your sources (over and over), into each other, you create “slurry everything boxes.” No feed can develop or maintain its own voice or style because all streams run together and lose their distinct personalities.
Folks over at Hacker News were not impressed, but I think he makes a pretty good case. In particular, the idea that something I tweet might end up (in all its Twitter-formatted glory) pulled onto all my other sites and then feel completely out of place, unclear and useless makes a lot of sense to me.
In any case, it was good to see someone thinking seriously about how and why to use the internet. See the next heading for the other side of that coin.
Apparently, quite a lot of people have no idea whatsoever how to use the internet. A few weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb ran an article titled Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. The article itself isn’t interesting - a bland discussion of Facebook and AOL teaming up on blah, blah blah. Take a look, however, at the note that RWW had to post on the article:
Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.
Apparently, quite a lot of people log into Facebook by (1) Googling for ‘Facebook login’ and then (2) assuming that the first hit is Facebook. When that doesn’t work (as in this case), these people are utterly, utterly lost. They have no fallback position. If you browse through the comments, you won’t know whether to laugh or cry or both.
I’m still tweeting, but I feel like I’m already running out of steam. I find it hard to figure out who else to follow, and I’ve already been badly disappointed by the streams of two people who (in other contexts) I found pretty interesting. Still, I’m going to keep using it for a bit. I may grow into it.
Having said that, I have found a few very interesting web applications built on top of Twitter’s API. One in particular that I recommend is bettween. It’s nearly impossible to follow long two-way conversations from Twitter, but bettween makes it easy and fun.
Ok, well, at least I can say that I posted once in February. I just got a very interesting new book (HTML & CSS: The Good Parts by Ben Henrick), so maybe I’ll push myself to write up a review of that next. Maybe March will even see two posts. Time will tell.