A tail of two blogs

Two Blogs

OK, here’s the deal. I started a Vox blog during beta. It went live a couple of weeks ago and I think it’s an excellent personal blogging engine.

Check out my personal blog at rickdt.vox.com

So I plan to post personal everyday stuff at Vox. If you want to know what frustrated me at work or the cute stuff that my dog did today, check out that blog.

I’m going to post twice/week about the application I’m building. The conversation (I expect some comments!) will center around technology and business.

Progress of Late

Progress has been really slow lately. Lots of factors have contributed, but I’ve got to keep plowing onward! I’m trying to put in at least 1 hour per night during the week and that hasn’t worked out too well lately. I’ll try to keep on the horse this week and let you know how it turns out mid-week and next weekend.

I have been putting in a lot of hours over the weekends, but they’re often distraction-prone. I’m finding myself going off-course due to the fact that I’m in a heavy re/learning phase. For instance, if I want to put up a new window then I find myself searching out the perfect web2.0 way to do with Unobtrusive Javascript plugins for Rails and all manner of fancy knick-knacks. I listened to an episode from one of my favorite podcasts about Pyrrhic victories which was very pertinent. In addition to that, as I was reading up on Unobtrusive Javascript, I learned that one of the tenants of UJS is to build a working site first and then add all the fancy Javascript functionality later. It’s the same ideal as separating style from content. You can build the site’s content and style it later, or in parallel, without having to worry about breaking one another in the process. We just add a third layer to that, so now it’s Content, Style, and Behavior (HTML, CSS, Javascript).

If you want to learn more about UJS, check out this ALA article on Behavioral Separation or this UJS presentation given at @Media – both by Jeremy Keith.