Scott Rutherford

Had a great evening last night at the Web Design Meetup on Great Portland St in London. Simon Willison gave a very interesting talk (even the lack of a functioning projector didn’t detract) on the Yahoo javascript / AJAX libraries that have been open sourced for us to all enjoy (there are his notes from a previous but similar presentation here, Simon is obviously a bit of an evangalizer for the Yahoo UI libraries and why not…)

Niklas Richardson also gave a speed introduction to Flex 2, which despite my general opinion of Flash I have to admit was very impressive.

In following up on these people I then came across the Brit Pack page which has some very interesting people / sites / info. Check it out.

Good step by step guide by Ben to adding user ids to the acts as taggable plugin.

The article fails a little short of covering all bases:

1. the tag_list method doesn’t take the user into account
2. the delete tags isn’t linked to a user

but, it is a good start.

Found a nice overview of the prototype library .

And then found Encytemedia and these articles about graceful degredation:

1. graceful-degredation-with-prototype-rails-part-1
2. graceful-degredation-with-prototype-rails-part-2

Encytemedia is the blog of Justin Palmer, and he has made a great job of customizing Typo.

It was a good evening yesterday at the LRUG meeting in Clerkenwell (Skills Matter). Both of the presentations were interesting, but it was the talk by Tom Armitage on ‘Ruby on Rails from the Other Side of the tracks’ that sparked my interests most. Although, I have to admit it wasn’t really the content on designers and programmers working in perfect harmony that got my attention as much as the talk about the Rails javascript helpers and the nasty javascript that they produce. This is outlined in a good article by Dan Web – ‘Rails is the Devil on you Client Side Shoulder’

Tom mentioned a plugin that has recently been released by Luke Redpath and Dan Web which (in Luke’s words) “allows you to use CSS selectors to attach Javascript events to your page. This plugin allows you to make use of the event:Selectors library, but in Ruby, directly from your controller or view and have the resulting behaviour rules dynamically generated at runtime in an external javascript file.”. This seems to me to be a much nicer way of doing things, nice one Luke and Dan.