Author Archives: Sarah

upgrading pie from rails 3.0 to 3.1

Whenever I upgrade Rails, I always start with “rails new” so that I get all the new config file goodness — I want to start fresh with whatever the new defaults are and then only make the modifications that I really want in my app. Here’s the process I went through upgrading the pie [...]

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rails 3.0 and rake 0.9.2

I really want to upgrade a Rails 3.0 project to Rails 3.1, but I’ve done a few spikes and it lacks test coverage, so I decided to pull in cucumber and write some features before moving forward.
I added cucumber-rails to my gemfile, and ran “bundle” and got this error:

/Users/sarah/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:289:in `load’: uninitialized constant Psych::Syck (NameError)

What I [...]

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mobile payments hidden costs

In the so-called 3rd world, mobile payments are stimulating economic growth and individual entrepreneurship. While in the United States, we struggle to overcome the legacy of an earlier trend in mobile payments facilitated by a plastic card. New players such as Square, Verifone, and Erply are bringing us, belatedly, into the modern world.
TechCrunch [...]

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gratuitous animation vs. meaningful motion

In 1996, I was working at Macromedia, when Rob Burgess took over as CEO. Shortly after he came on board, an edict came down from the top: “no more gratuitous animation.” I saw people look at each other bewildered, most employees thought that the company was all about gratuitous animation. I agreed with Rob.
Don’t [...]

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pink and princesses

Lisa Bloom is right on target with her recent article How to Talk to Little Girls. Her story of a little girl in a pink ruffled dress being presented to the guests is so reminiscent of my own experience, but the following genuine conversation was not and I wish it had been.
I so wanted to [...]

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multicountry/multilingual seo

Following my recent post, a colleague (@mightyverse) found a great review of how to handle SEO for multiple languages.
SEO for international multilingual projects
View more presentations from Ani Lopez
Ani Lopez provides good reasoning that we should offer distinct pages for translations, since we want to target those pages to a [...]

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on localization and translation

In thinking about presenting a web site in a different languages, there are a few very different concerns:

A localized user interface.
Localized brand
Unique content
User-generated content in different languages
Translated content

In addition, some sites might consider SEO Translation to entice people searching in their native language to find a site even if the site itself isn’t translated (but [...]

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sf rails meetup talks about performance

I attended the SF Ruby on Rails meetup last week with two excellent talks on performance. The first talk, by Brian Doll (@briandoll) of New Relic, provided an overview of how to think about performance. In the second talk, Guillaume Luccisano (@luckwi) of justin.tv shared his experience of optimizing their Rails app.
Performance is a [...]

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truths about starting a company

I love Tara Hunt’s synopsis of being a startup entreprenuer (via Women 2.0)

Her whole presentation really resonates with my experience. Changing the world is tough. That’s what starting a company is all about. I got involved in a startup straight out of college. From the very early days of CoSA (The Company of [...]

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trackerbot iphone experience

TrackerBot is a new iOS application that lets us access PivotalTracker — an issue/feature tracking system from Pivotal Labs. TrackerBot (just $4.95 in the App Store) works on iPad and iPhone, but I’ve just used it on my phone. A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Olympic National Park in Washington State. [...]

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