Yesterday Google announced the release of Chrome 11 beta.  As usual Google Chrome team continues to push the limits of the web.  With this release they made public their use of a little known Web API for decoding speech into text.  The new API from google is not documented and has probably been in existence since early 2009 when they opened up more of Google Voice and made know their use of transcription for voice mail.   These features are all very interesting.  Thanks to the good work from “don’t panic”, it was very easy to put together a ruby library that helps make it even easier to use the speech API.  Check out the source a github.com.

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Static asset bundling in Ruby on Rails is super easy with assemblage.

SSL is important when dealing with user data. The rails 3 router makes it easy to mark specific sections of your application secure using the :constraints option within a scope block.

Nearly all our client projects require some sort of email.  We make it part of our standard process to always have a staging environment for each of our applications.   The merits of a staging environment ensure that we always validate and can redeploy our applications at moments notice.   To that end occasionally we’ll want to transfer some portion of production data into one of our staging environments.   When we do that we never want to risk having an email triggered via crontab or user action that inadvertently sends an email to a client, from the staging server instead of the production server.   To avoid and allow validation of email transactions,  we have released a very simple rails+smtp service that allows us to have our staging environment talk to a real smtp server that can record each email.   This allows our QA engineers to easily verify emails are sending from crontab or specific user actions.   Here’s the project on github.  Deploying the service is just as easy as deploying a normal rails application.

cap deploy
cap smtp:start

The cap file would need to be modified before as we keep our host keys private and they’re targeted to our named hosts.  e.g.  o1 and tools

Planning to release more software in the coming months hopefully this is useful for others as well.

For a number of our web design and web development clients (like liberty central, spms, and pliris) we had a need to build an easy to use interface for managing a rotating header. We really liked how Wordpress 3.0 added the ability to configure a custom page header, and so we extended on that to build an interface that can be used to configure multiple header images that rotate. We have since made it a free plugin to share with other Wordpress users.

How much is too much? At what point do we overwhelm our websites with links to, lets be honest, 3rd party sites? Are we driving users away from the very place we purport to use social media to drive them to?

In previous articles we have shown you how to add Facebook Like and Share buttons to your site and how to embed a Tweet button on your site – you can even see our Twitter feed on the right of this blog and retweet or share on Facebook this article from links below (we hope you do)! We are obviously big fans of engagement through social media, and while perhaps we need to take it a step further on our own site (stay tuned for our forthcoming redesign), I think some people might be taking it too far.

Well, maybe not fun, but less annoying for sure!

You’ve probably encountered a 404 or “Page Not Found” error in your web browsing experience. It is an HTTP standard response code indicating that “the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future.” This kind of error is commonly displayed after you click a broken link or follow a link to a page that has moved or no longer exists on a website. (If you want more technical details, check out Wikipedia.)

Of course no one wants their website to have errors, but sometimes they occur. There is definitely value in taking a little time to dress up your “Error” or “404″ page to decrease the frustration when a user encounters it. So what can you do to make the navigation process on your website less of a headache to users?

Two days ago, micro-blogging platform Twitter and social media data provider Gnip, announced a partnership to make Twitter data commercially available through Gnip’s Social Media API. “This partnership opens the door to developers who want to use Twitter streams to create monitoring and analytics tools for the non-display market.”

Last week, Google launched the Beta version of “In-Page Analytics” – a visual aid that sits on top of your website to give context to the data that regular Google Analytics provides. Google Analytics is a great tool for webmasters to track traffic to their website, what users are doing on the site, and what people are clicking on.

I don’t know about you but it is an everyday battle with designers, developers and clients on what the proper terminology for a box that holds content on the website is called. As a designer I know it as a module, for developers it is known as a widget and for clients it is known as the whatchamacallit/box/thing.

How can one simple box have so many different names for it? Why can’t the world wide web use one name instead of a range of names?