Shameless Plug

Yep, I did it finally. With some help from a number of friends there is now a wikipedia page for David Andrew Thompson. I've included it in my sidebar for those who would like to know a bit more about me.

Here's the link: David Andrew Thompson

A Nice Ajax Flickrshow

I ran across this bit of code for displaying your Flickr sets on your own website. I like the concept. It seems clean. I'm not sure that I like referencing a javascript library that is not local to my site. God forbid someone hack their site and post some malicious code that I've linked to.

Here's the link http://www.flickrshow.com/

Create Example Apps for Your Plugins

May I throw out an idea for plugins?

Let's begin to put sample applications together for our plugins as a standard practice.

This would be beneficial for a number of reasons:
1. Nothing teaches better than a real world example.
2. A working application leaves little room for excuses in not being able to get a plugin working.
3. Apps can help demonstrate best practices in coding
4. (etc., etc.)

It is as simple as creating a folder with the plugin titled "application" which holds the example application. There will be no overhead to the user's app even if the application is never accessed. And they can delete the application folder should they choose to.

I have beaten my head against several walls trying to work through documentation written by people who often times forget that their audience may be approaching Ruby for the first time. It is not enough to simply demonstrate the basic ruby idioms for new users. Just because the author can whip out the ruby console and run through the usage from there does not mean that the average end-user will be able to make the transition into usage of the plugin in the view and controller layers of their Rails apps.

Ultimately it is up to the author to make this happen, but I just wanted to put in my two cents