Demoing Amethyst tonight (May 9, 2011)
I will be one of four people demoing their products at Bootstrap Austin tonight at 7-9pm. It will be held at Link Coworking on Anderson near the Alamo Drafthouse, 2700 West Anderson Lane #205. Leave...
View ArticleConditional GET Requests
Amethyst fetches updates to all subscribed RSS feeds every hour. And most of the time, there is nothing new. This is a waste of bandwidth and CPU usage, both Amethyst’s and the RSS feed server. I...
View ArticleClever Hack, Smelly Code
A common operation in Amethyst is to retrieve the feed information from the database, and the number of unread articles in the feed. Operating in pure SQL I could do something like this SELECT feeds.*,...
View Article:update Considered Harmful
A common Rails 2 view helper call is something along the lines of link_to_remote "Delete this post", :update => dom_id(post), :url => { :action => "destroy", :id => post.id }. This sends an...
View ArticleActiveRecord callback methods deprecated in 2.3.8
According to this, instance callback instance were deprecated, starting in Rails 2.3.8. An instance callback method is like this: class Item By ActiveRecord 3.1.3 (used in Padrino 0.10.5), instance...
View ArticleFaraday?
The most troublesome, ugly, bug infested code in Amethyst fetches RSS feeds in the face of Internet congestion, down servers, buggy RSS implementations, incorrect encodings, and so on. I’ve tried...
View ArticleNew Shiny versus Getting Things Done
As Your favourite programming language is not good enough points out, don’t fall in love with a programming language and stay with it until “death do you part”. Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m...
View ArticleMore on the Future
The Sun is Setting on Rails-style MVC Frameworks points out a lot of the same problems I am encountering with Amethyst and suggests a direction to move. Including pointing out what isn’t there yet in...
View ArticleSoftware Speed, Programming Languages, and Hardware
Three articles I’ve read recently have altered my thinking about data structures, algorithms, and performance. They confirm my belief that the more you and your code knows about the structure of your...
View ArticleAmethyst’s Fate
As mentioned in Beauty, a previous post, I’m shutting down Amethyst on the Internet. I’m my only current customer and it’s taking time and money to keep it running that can be better spent elsewhere....
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