nicholasjon.com :: a weblog >> posts tagged: code

Launched: pnt.me

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:57:39 GMT

When the dot-me domains were released a few weeks ago, I thought it might be fun to pick one up and officially launch some “url shortening” code I’d been experimenting with. Today I managed to put the finishing touches on the first version of pnt.me — which I think looks a lot like “point me,” but won’t waste any extra characters in your tweets.

It’s a standard url shortener, meaning you give it a link that looks something like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pwst=1&q=url+shortening&start=10&sa=N and it gives you back something more like http://pnt.me/CzwU9K.

It does have a few other features:

There’s a “copy to clipboard” link, saving you the trouble of highlighting, right-clicking, and so on. Not huge, but nice.
Adding a semi-colon to the end of any link will forgo automatic redirection, and instead take users to the “details” page for that link. Check it out: http://pnt.me/CzwU9K;. It’s useful for those times you want to see exactly where you’re going, instead of being Rickrolled.
There’s also the beginnings of a sort of spam-alert, in that if enough people have clicked the abuse link the automatic redirection stops. Users are instead taken to the details page and shown a warning letting them know them know there have been reported problems with the content behind the shortened link. Everyone can still get to their destination — but it’s at their own risk. I set up a fake one here http://pnt.me/PjgpM9; so you can see what I mean. (Update: Enough people clicked through anyway that the warning went away. I guess the system works.)

I’m working on a bookmarklet that will let you shorten links from anywhere on the web, but it’s got issues in IE. And sites with frames. And Wikipedia. (Like I said, I’m working on it.) Try it out if you like, your mileage may vary. I hope to have a new and improved (read: “working”) version up soon.

All in all, I’m quite happy with how things are coming together. It’s fun to polish and release code originally intended to just be a weekend project. Personally, I got a lot more out of the experience knowing it would be in front of someone other than me when it was finished.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter who helped test things out this afternoon. And extra thanks to Jaythan for adding some most-excellent style my wireframes.

What did Apple BASIC sound like?

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:44:57 GMT

Extracting the ancient software from its audio cassette.

Link: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=32

Sketching in Code

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:39:28 GMT

Wireframes have less use in a world that’s no longer based on the “page.”

Link: http://alistapart.com/articles/sketchingincode

New Relic

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:46:48 GMT

A whole company forms around the idea of Ruby on Rails scalability. I’m hoping a lot of neat stuff comes from this.

Link: http://www.newrelic.com/

Forget about February

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:41:09 GMT

Let’s just pretend I didn’t post anything last month, because if we don’t do that I’ll have to publicly admit that I deleted a month’s worth of posts without a reasonable way to bring them back — which I’d rather not do.

In good news, while I was working through everything I added Twitter support to the blog. Now I can put my 140 characters of pithyness in two places at the same time.

JsonMarshaller

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 08:17:05 GMT

A Java to Javascript (well, JSON anyway) marshalling framework.

Link: http://www.twolattes.com/code.php

Devils and details

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:10:48 GMT

I stumbled across a fantastic quote in this article on software development:

The devil is in the details, but exorcism is in implementation, not theory.

(It’s attributed to Dave Farell, but I can’t find an actual source.)

Fantastic little nugget.

Updating Rubygems

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 05:24:03 GMT

Here’s how I updated my MacBook Pro from Rails 1.2.1 to Rails 1.2.3:

sudo gem update --system
sudo mv /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/source_cache ~/tmp
mv ~/.gem/ ~/tmp/
gem sources
sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Those five lines of code took about an hour and some serious Googling to figure out. Ah well, back to work.

Update: You may (probably will) get an error after you run “sudo gem install rails—include-dependencies”. I’m not sure exactly why, but running the same command again will finally update your Rails install. Anyone with a better solution should feel free to pop a comment down below.

Time Sensitive CSS Switcher

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:54:14 GMT

A front-page Digg story about swapping out CSS files depending on the time of day. It’s nice to see so many people interested in the technique, I guess I’m just a little surprised people are finding the idea so groundbreaking. This guy does it with Javascript, and while that’s not a bad idea, I still think a server-side solution is best.

Link: http://www.digg.com/design/Time_Sensitive_CSS_Switcher

Why Ruby?

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:07:08 GMT

There’s a contest at ‘On Ruby’ to write the best article about how Ruby has made you a better developer. Though I consider it to be way to self-congratulatory for its own good — approaching the sort of fanboyism that puts Ruby developers in the same category as religious zealots — do feel an obligation to admit that Ruby really has made me a better programmer.

Rather than ramble on about PHP, Javascript and the way I used to code, let me just explain why I think I’m a better developer because of Ruby like so: Ruby rewards me for doing things the way I ought to do them, and once I’ve done things the right way it is very difficult for me to slip back into my old habits regardless of language.