• AI Ruby plugins (via rubyflow.com) - list of AI related libraries for Ruby. Parsing, Machine Learning, Semantic stuff…
• Programming Collective Intelligence Python to Ruby translation - I guess a lot of people here read
  Programming Collective Intelligence from Toby Segaran. I can only recommend it - it’s a great book, and now even better with Ruby source code

• Git and Ruby Tutorials - a great collection from rubyinside.com, also the comments contain a few good pointers.
• 
  acts_as_dropdown - acts_as_dropdown allows any ActiveRecord class to be easily used as the contents of a HTML select tag.
• Handling JavaScript Events on Multiple Elements - proper JS/Prototype event handling!
• tranexp - Dr. Nic in action again. This time it’s a dead simple translator gem.

For the sake of future comparison, out of plain fun and for just whatever else, here are some statistics of my first about-half-a-year of blogging:

Global Statistics

1. 1,057,638 successful requests for an average of approximately 4000 requests/day
2. 622,776 page views for an average of approximately 2300 page views/day
3. 34 posts and 364 comments, contained within 15 categories. This statistically means a post gets about 11 comments on average
4. Data transferred: 10.54 GB, which is a daily average of approximately 40 MB
5. Current AdSense CPM: 2.04$ (is this good or bad? It is hard to get such info on the net…)

Content

1. Most popular post (i.e. most page hits): Data extraction for Web 2.0: Screen scraping in Ruby/Rails (nearly 10.000 reads)
2. Most debated/controversial post (i.e. most comments): Sometimes less is more (45 comments)
3. Most referenced article: Install Internet Explorer on Ubuntu Dapper in 3 easy steps (9 references)
4. Best runner-up: Implementing ‘15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language’

Platforms

1. 57% Windows (quite surprising for a site where the most popular search terms were ‘ubuntu ruby rails’ and ‘dapper ruby install’ )
2. 27% Linux
3. 16% Mac

Browsers

1. 74% Firefox & Mozilla
2. 14% Internet Explorer (83% IE 6.0, 16% IE 7.0)
3. 7% Safari
4. 3% Opera

Top 5 referring sources

1. google.com
2. direct
3. stumbleupon.com
4. dzone.com
5. del.icio.us

Given that rubyrailways.com is my first attempt at blogging, I am studying Ruby for just a few months now (I even started this blog earlier than I wrote my first Ruby script), I have really little time for blogging and that I am not a native speaker, these figures are not that bad I guess . Of course I would like to improve them even more, so please leave a comment with suggestions on this - what would you like to see here in 2007?

Tagline: Blogging is a very easy looking activity, until you actually begin with it…

Most probably even the irregular readers of rubyrailways have noticed a 3 month period of silence during the summer, which has just ended a few days ago. In my opinion it is generally not a very good idea to temporarily abandon a blog, without even announcing a summer holiday or posting a note like “to be continued after an undefined period of blogger’s block” or something. Why did I allow it happen then?

Well, there are a handful of reasons for this: summer holidays, though days at the work, lot of stuff to do on my PhD but mainly a kind of a blogger’s crisis. Although all the reasons are very interesting, I would like to elaborate on the last one a bit.

The first problem stems from the relative success of my previous entries: Tutorials like Install Internet Explorer on Ubuntu Dapper in 3 easy steps, Data extraction for Web 2.0: Screen scraping in Ruby/Rails or Getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Ubuntu Dapper were quite popular and set a standard which was not easy to top (or at least to maintain) in terms of equally interesting topics. Unfortunately I can pursue Ruby, Rails and even screen scraping/web extraction only in my spare time which is a scarce resource (it’s kind of hard to work full time, roll a PhD and blog simultaneously ) and therefore I do not bump into an interesting topic just every second day. However, this eventually got me into a kind-of an inverse Concorde-effect: If I have waited a week, then I can wait another to deliver something sexy. After a month: Now that I have waited a month, I surely have to come up with something really juicy… You get the idea.

I believe I am not the only one around with this thinking pattern, and I am not sure how are others handling this problem, but I have decided to give up this habit - in the future I would like to blog regularly, even at the cost that not every post will be a top-notch blockbuster .

The second problem is that I am kind of a renaissance guy: I am interested in new technologies, programming, science research, economics, reading books just about everything, photography, traveling, computer games, sports… However, since rubyrailways is my first attempt at blogging, I am quite unsure how to deal with this amount of information: what should be the ratio of not-necessarily-correlated topics (e.g. Ruby, travelling and PhD research). I am nearly sure though that it is not a good idea to blog about everything, since then every post will be uninteresting for most of the readers.

Yes, I know that categories were invented to workaround this problem. However, in my experience most of the people today are using feed aggregators and/or personal start pages like bloglines, netvibes or pageflakes, and hence are facing this problem nevertheless. Yes, they could ignore the posts that are not interesting to them, but after doing so a few times they will potentially ignore your whole blog. So how to find the golden mean?

A possible solution is to have a separate blog for everything: In my case this would mean at least a software development (mainly Ruby/Rails), general technology, Linux/Ubuntu, Science/PhD research and a travelling blog. Well, I certainly would not have the time to keep up all of them since I am struggling even with rubyrailways … I could of course ignore what people think about my blog and just write it to myself, but that would deprive me from knowing what other people think about the things I am after, which is a very valuable information for me.

I would be very much interested in your opinion on this topic: How do you solve this ‘feature creep’ on your blog - by maintaining more blogs, focusing on just one topic and ignoring the others, or trying to balance somehow?

Please leave me a comment or send me a mail, I’d really like to hear your opinion…

Finally… After several months, my google analytics invitation has arrived.
Does it offer more than any ‘usual’ page statistics tool that can be found on the net?
Short answer: absolutely! For the detailed analysis of analytics read on…

My site is hosted at dreamhost, and they offer a pre-installed logfile analyser, analog, which claims to be ‘The most popular logfile analyser in the world’. It has a decent feature set (not too much graphical fancy stuff, but nice analysis nevertheless), still i wanted to give a try to something different, too - so i have installed statcounter, ‘A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats’.

I have been quite satisfied with both statistics (although in the free version of statcounter, the log size is limited to 100 hits) - until i have seen what google analytics is capable of.

The number of features that google analytics has to offer is HUGE. I am using it for a week now, and there are still some statistics which i simply did not have time to look at. There are quick overview screens for everything important (above you can see one of them) - and if you would like to drill down to every single hit, you have the possibility too.

Ever wanted to know everything about your visitors? No problem. You can view every single visititor’s referral link, which country/city did he come from (also displayed on the world map), connection speed, platform, browser, screen resolution (even color depth!), language, which keywords did lead them to you, their loyalty, conversion rate (i have listed just a small fraction of featues)… and all this presented with nice graphs, charts etc. Simply unbelievable.

I will not write anything more about this tool, since if you have it, you know what i am talking about, and if not, go and get it if you are interested in your web site stats!

My advice is: forget about ANY kind of stat counter, and request a google analytics account ASAP.

Just two weeks after Ruby on Rails was featured in the prominent Dr Dobb’s Journal, it gets into the limelight again, in even greater power than before: Guess who is staring at you from the frontpage of Linux Journal? Yes, it’s DHH… and the reason? The current issue is full of Ruby and Rails articles, tips and tricks etc. Read the full story at David’s blog.

Every second blog I came across recently has an entry about google trends, so I am adding my small findings too!

After playing with it for a few hours, I have to say that writing a relevant query is not always as easy as it seems. People are posting Java vs Python vs Ruby comparisons, but they are not always aware that the graph contains (among other things) the comparison of an island, a comedy troupe (Monty Python) and a character set (Ruby Characters), for example. According to wikipedia, all three terms have more than ten possible meanings, and although a tech nerd may know only one for each of them, not all pages out there are (fortunately) written by tech guys.

Let’s start with some Rails related stuff:

Well, I wonder who else recently (not even necessarily in the computer industry) got so famous in a matter of days… It is interesting that there is no data available for “David Heinemeier Hansson” or even “David Hansson”, just for DHH.

The next graph could answer the question whether it is a good idea for a web hosting company today to support Ruby on Rails:

For the idea of the following googleTrendFight thanks for Laszlo on Rails blog.

It’s really thrilling to see that a (once) small open source community can compete with enterprise stuff of such magnitude as JBoss/EJB (ok, this is kind of apples-to-oranges, but nevertheless interesting). If you wonder why did JBoss’ search volume go dramatically up - it’s because RedHat bought the company.

Non-Rails related: slashdot.com vs digg.com vs reddit.com:

No comment…

The last one about wikipedia, kind of funny:

Why should be this funy? Because the only point in the history (so far) when search volume for wikipedia was declining was because of:

Probably (hopefully?!?!) there is no direct link between these facts, but it is an interesting random coincidence then…

I wonder whether google will improve the quality of this search and/or add possibility to specify advanced queries to prevent mixing in of irrelevant results - at the moment, if I did try to narrow the search, in lot of cases i got back ‘data not available’… Interesting toy, though.

I am in the process of redesigning rubyrailways.com, so you can see every kind of weird experiments sometimes (I am too lazy to do the whole thing offline, because that would mean to set up Apache, PHP, Wordpress, MySQL … etc, and the other reason is: I have too limited time to do it quick).

As you can see, currently I am experimenting with one of the most widespread cliché of today’s webdesign: round corners. There are infinite possibilities to round your corners - as my primary focus is not web design, i am not really an expert on the topic, but i have seen a lot of methods (various ratio of (no) images, JS and CSS). For example, a Firefox friendly quick’n'dirty solution:

(no images and JS needed, but has severe cross-browser restrictions - if you are reading this from IE (or probably anything other than Firefox) you know what i mean).

Browsing through the possible solutions, i have chosen Nifty cube. It is an image-less solution, all you need is to add 1 line of Javascript and a few lines of CSS code to make it work. It has a lot of options (this i already the second version, which is a substantial overhaul compared to the first one),

and for me it worked nicely. (Have to work on the actual usage, though - The rounded div’s around the title are too big ATM, but this is not the problem of Nifty cube)

About a month or so ago, we begun to work on a new ruby puzzle site entitled rubychallenge.com with Alex Combas.

Some people may think after reading this line: “Yet another ‘not pron’ or ‘pythonchallenge.com’ clone”. Well, i would not say we did not borrow some basic concepts from these great puzzle sites, but our final product will have not very much in common with them: There will be programming puzzles on rubychallenge.com, and the domain suffix is equal with that of the pythonchallenge site. However, the analogy stops here. Rubychallenge will offer an entirely different programming/game/puzzle experience compared to all the similar sites out there, both in terms of game concepts and mechanics, as well as entirely unique site structure/design.

We have tons of ideas in our wiki already, and right now we are fledging out which ones to implement. Alex just set up a working development environment, so after ironing out some ideas crucial to begin, we might even write some code soon We would like to come up with a presentation/demo page as soon as possible, and possibly a development blog to inform you what’s going on. At some point we would like to incorporate some beta testers, so stay tuned!

According to more people (including me), the nicest wrapup of the Canda on Rails conference can be found here: Canada on Rails, Day One and here (part 2): Canada on Rails, Day Two.

Some things i found interesting/funny:

The first speaker was (surprise, surprise!) David Heinemeier Hansson. He had an interesting slide:

Alex’s comment:

“David explains in no uncertain terms that some people do shout quite loudly for features to be brought into rails core and when it makes sense to incorporate those features he does, but sometimes it really makes no sense and so he tells them a frank “no” and this sometimes seems to cause people to complain and even threaten to stop using “my free product” which elicits the response that you see in Davids presentation slide above. “

Hmm. Interesting explanation On the presentation of Amy Hoy:

“Second to last was Amy Hoy, and I dont think I need to tell you that she did a great job. Her talk was entitled “Ajax with Rails” so she actually got to demonstrate some live code and even wrote some for us in real time in response to a question someone in the audience asked…“

I wish i had the nerves to do this, usually i am happy if i can present my prepared slides at a conference, not write LIVE CODE

For the full event description read Alex’s blog.

Another nice conference notes can be found here: At the canada on rails conference.

Google SOC is opened for 2006.

I think nothing can prove the success of the project better than the very fact that in 2006, google is again offering an opportunity to fund talented students from the whole world (See the geographical distribution of the 2005 SOC coders) to participate in top open source projects.

The Ruby/Ruby on Rails community didn’t respond quickly enough last year, but hopefully in 2006, backed by rubycentral.org we will not miss this great opportunity to get some motivated and talented people on board.