Update: I cleaned up and packaged this for Bootstrap 2.0 as a gem.

Read the rest of this post »

https://github.com/bigbento/marionette

I spent about an hour last weekend cleaning out my inbox. Beyond the daily deal emails (which I now have a filter for), and updates from the likes of Facebook, Discogs and eBay (not to mention vanilla spam), there's that hard-to-categorize, almost-spam that seems to pop up every other week. It's from the usual suspects: retailers like Borders and Newegg and upsellers like your frequent flyer account and grocery store club. The subject lines more or less always included 'sale' and '% off'. However, it's solicited--that relationship is valuable enough to justify not clicking the "unsubscribe" link. But with retrospective goggles, I just trashed that shit.

On the other hand, I archived the newsletters I got. Their subject lines are more along the lines of "this month's newsletter". Granted, their content is a lot better than the weekly spam updates, but their purpose is the same: to get me to buy something. And it's more effective. I read Woot and Amazon Web Services' newsletters and (enthusiastically) use their services/products all the time.

Moral of the story: have your copywriter write a little bit of quality content rather than barrage me with crap. I'll buy more from you.

I updated Lurker, my geo-location based happy-hour finding application. It's in a sort-of closed beta in that there's a single login for the admin panel. If you want to add happy hours, just ask and maybe I'll let you in. Also, it's only designed for iPhone and Android browsers at this point.

(download)

Click here to download:

untitled-mdhayJyHyqmzvEIdAJzf.zip (178 KB)

I always thought there was something a little strange about the way Amazon classified their EC2 instances. Then it dawned on me, so I fixed their menu:

HEART ACHE FOOT ACHE IZU DANCER TINY DANCER

PayPal’s definition of ‘joy’.

I haven’t seen anything like this out there, so here’s a list of program versions in a vanilla install of Snow Leopard, with no XCode installed. Yep, this is what your mom can look forward to in her new iMac:

These RubyGems are installed:

• actionmailer (2.2.2, 1.3.6)
• actionpack (2.2.2, 1.13.6)
• actionwebservice (1.2.6)
• activerecord (2.2.2, 1.15.6)
• activeresource (2.2.2)
• activesupport (2.2.2, 1.4.4)
• acts_as_ferret (0.4.3)
• capistrano (2.5.2)
• cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0)
• daemons (1.0.10)
• dnssd (0.6.0)
• fastthread (1.0.1)
• fcgi (0.8.7)
• ferret (0.11.6)
• gem_plugin (0.2.3)
• highline (1.5.0)
• hpricot (0.6.164)
• libxml-ruby (1.1.2)
• mongrel (1.1.5)
• needle (1.3.0)
• net-scp (1.0.1)
• net-sftp (2.0.1, 1.1.1)
• net-ssh (2.0.4, 1.1.4)
• net-ssh-gateway (1.0.0)
• rails (2.2.2, 1.2.6)
• rake (0.8.3)
• RedCloth (4.1.1)
• ruby-openid (2.1.2)
• ruby-yadis (0.3.4)
• rubynode (0.1.5)
• sqlite3-ruby (1.2.4)
• termios (0.9.4)
• xmpp4r (0.4)

The inclusion of PHP 5.3 is particularly interesting. It only came out in July, and changes a lot of stuff. Hooray closures.