Mapping the political landscape \\ Ruby on Rails in action with a quick mashup

jafoca | September 24, 2008

croppercapture43-300x90 Mapping the political landscape \\ Ruby on Rails in action with a quick mashupRecently I have been working with the ruby on rails guru Daniel Morrison on a rails app for one of our web clients.  Daniel along with Brandon and Brian form Collective Idea, a ruby on rails house that also runs Sessions, RoR and other training sessions in Holland, MI that I attended a couple of months ago.

Anyhow, Collective Idea produced the open source (free) Ruby on Rails plugin called acts_as_geocodable (free to download/instal from github), which we were implementing for the project I am developing.

While working on that, Daniel showed me the quick google maps mashup he produced over the past weekend to map political signs.  The basic idea is to map where you see Obama or McCain yard signs to get an idea of the overall political composition of your neighborhood.  Pretty cool, and a good showcase of acts_as_geocodable

Map your neighborhood’s political signs here.

UPDATE: signs.collectiveidea.com is now yardvote.com

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Google Chrome - Review, 1 week later

jafoca | September 12, 2008

So I have been using Chrome almost exclusively as my job as a web developer permits.  I have to say now - I am switching back to the Fox.

Its not that I didn’t like chrome, but it had a couple of problems that I can not overlook any longer.  So here is the quick rundown:

What’s Hot:

Explosive performance, slick simplistic (googlish interface), built in “run as application” ability, task manager

What’s Not:

Extreme flash / shockwave performance issues, lack of plugins, some site incompatibility

Summary:

If it could handle flash and youtube stuff without completely choking, and had a more accessible web developer plugin, I would still be using it.

Note: I have since attempted to make the Trusty Fox look and act more like chrome as per the lifehacker instructions. The act like chrome is working somewhat thanks to Prism and a couple of other plugins, but the look like part was a bit too glitchy for prime time.  Maybe in the future….

Rating: ★★★½☆

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HTML Doctype declaration - Can really mess you up!

jafoca | August 20, 2008

So yesterday we discovered a bug in the Blue Sky Sessions website.  I think that I probably introduced it when I was fiddling with getting our contact form looking pretty last week, although I have no idea how as the contact form is not presented with the portfolio where the bug occurred.  The bug consisted of the entire layout being shifted to the left hand side of the screen from its normal centered position, quite embarrassing.  It only happened in IE, and was only on one of our pages.

Anyhow - I took to looking at the code and found that structurally the template was exactly the same as the other pages, so it should have been centered.  I really could not find this bug!  Getting frustrated, I asked Barry (my boss / coworker) to have a look at it.  After deleting most of the page he noticed that I was missing an HTML DOCTYPE declaration.  Yuck.htmlsvg1-263x300 HTML Doctype declaration - Can really mess you up!

He put this in and of course (silly me, I should have thought of that…) it worked.  The doctype tells the browser how to parse the HTML code, I did not realize that it had actual importance to interpretation so I was not too attentive to it in the past.

An example doctype declaration is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

So anyway, if you are having goofy HTML bugs then be sure to check out your doctype.  An excellent reference for anything HTML is w3schools.

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