Posted by h3rald
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:30:00 GMT
When you decided to learn Ruby on Rails (if you did, that is), chances are that you bought a book. I did, too, actually: there are a lot of very interesting and fairly comprehensive books out there after all.
I actually never bought a book to learn PHP, in the past though. Why’s that? Well, for two simple reasons:
- The PHP manual can easily be searched and provides enough documentation, in most cases.
- When the documentation is not enough, there’s always plenty of comments by experienced developers to save your day.
That being said, PHP is still an awfully disorganized language, but believe it or not, coming from PHP I didn’t find Rails documentation useful enough simply because it didn’t have these two simple but very powerful features.
Sure, there’s the Rails Documentation Project which provides more organized docs, and Noobkit does a nice job with its search-as-you-type feature… but still is not quite enough: you’d expect something much better than that for something like Rails!
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Posted in Articles | Tags Rails, review, ruby, writing | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:46:00 GMT
When the SitePoint staff asked me to write an article summing up all the new features of Firefox 3, I gladly accepted: I wrote about Firefox before, and I thought it was just going to be a 2-3 hours job maximum.
After diving deeper into Firefox 3 development, reading dozens of different blogs and scouting Mozilla’s web sites, I realized I was wrong: Firefox 3 introduced a lot of new things, and keeping track of all of them, I admit, was quite a hard task.
Nevertheless, I wrote the article and delivered it to SitePoint in time fore the release, but my editor “complained” that 8,300+ words was about 3 times over the minimum requirements for a feature article!
“I don’t really think that people can read the whole thing online” —, he said, and I somehow agreed.
In the end, they decided to pack my “article” into a 30-pages PDF eBook which can be downloaded absolutely free of charge from SitePoint web site as well, so here it is:
Firefox 3 Revealed
If you prefer though, you can still read the article directly on SitePoint, here.
This guide aims to give you a comprehensive overview of virtually all the new features and improvements introduced by Firefox 3.
I would like to thank the whole SitePoint staff for giving me the opportunity to write this eBook, and in particular Matthew Magain for his help and support (and for creating the PDF on a Sunday evening!).
Additionally, I would also like to thank the Mozilla Development Team for their awesome job with Firefox 3 and everyone else who made this eBook possible.
Update: Feel free to digg this eBook!
Posted in Blog | Tags books, browsers, Firefox, review, writing | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:18:00 GMT
Opera 9.5 is out, Firefox 3 too (more or less), so, which browser are you going to use today?
This new generatio of browsers offers plenty of new, innovative features and improvements over the past, in both cases:
- You can finally use Firefox because it finally doesn’t eat up all your RAM
- You can finally use Opera because it is finally “understand” ajaxified web sites like Gmail
Amazingly, these two releases have a lot in common…
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Posted in Blog | Tags browsers, Firefox, Opera, review | 6 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:30:00 GMT
“It has been a while since my last post, sorry about that”
I read this sentence (or something along those lines) on many blogs on the Internet, including mine. As a matter of fact, I actually didn’t write a meaningful post on my blog for a long time and no, probably this is not going to change that either.
Yesterday I started thinking why this happens, not only to me but to a lot of other non-professional bloggers. A professional blogger &emdash; for what I can tell &emdash; is someone like Michael Arrington or Gina Trapani: someone who has the luck (or course) to be able to just blog for a living.
I don’t blog for a living: my site is self-sustaining via a few very unobtrusive ads, just that. I have a full time job, and I blog in my spare time about my interests, without even trying to make “proper” money from my site. There’s nothing wrong with it: I believe there are some other people in my condition, and that’s quite normal.
That being said, let’s examine the ten most common reasons why I (and you too, maybe) end up not updating my blog, even when I have time to do so.
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Posted in Blog | Tags internet, personal, rant, writing | 2 comments | no trackbacks
