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Patching StaticMatic’s deficiencies: setting HAML options and fixing the locals hash

November 30th, 2008

Staticmatic 0.9.4 ships with 2 surprisingly serious deficiencies:

1. Configuration options can’t be passed to HAML
2. The locals hash isn’t passed to partials

The solution for partials has been given by Randy Parker.

The solution for HAML options has been given by Jason Tennier.

Either of these issues would have been a dealbreaker for me, so I was glad to see they both had relatively easy fixes. Although coming from the Perl world, I do get pissed off whenever I have to hand-edit the source of a gem And as a newbie to StaticMatic, I do wonder how well the gem is being maintained now. Both of these patches have been around for a while, yet they haven’t made it into the distribution, and I wonder why?

Updated: So the maintainer says he’s been busy, fair enough. With the bug fixes above in place, Staticmatic is nice enough. Having an application server obviates the need to “build,” and if you know me you know how much I hate the build process ^.~ So that to me already sets staticmatic apart from other template engines. I’m really looking forward to 2.0

Posted in Solutions, Code, Ruby/Rails | 48 Comments »

I’m about to start blogging for the Science Channel

October 28th, 2008

Check out my new blog, Nerdabout New York. Launching November 15.

For some reason someone thought I knew something about nerds, and it led, very rapidly to this.


Posted in Solutions | 245 Comments »

News groups and mailing lists 2008

September 27th, 2008

I’ve got some suggestions as to which usenet news groups and mailing lists (or listservs) are worth following with regard to keeping up-to-date on what’s happening in Client-Side (or Presentation Layer or Front-End) Web development.


Posted in User Experience, Code | 174 Comments »

Progressive Enhancement

September 25th, 2008

One of the things I was doing while working for the College Board was researching strategies for accessible Web content. So it became apparent that Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement, or what we used to call Graceful Degradation, was in fact the best architectural strategy for ensuring an accessible and robust user experience.


Posted in User Experience, DHTML, Accessibility | 96 Comments »

Delicious via: tag bookmarklet

August 16th, 2008

I just got finished writing a new version of the del.cio.us whuffie bookmarklet. It’s a bookmarklet that adds via: tags to your bookmarks for attribution purposes, so you can have a little extra meta-data about where your links are coming from.


Posted in User Experience, JavaScript | 100 Comments »

Firefox Extensions

August 14th, 2008

Lately I have been fielding a lot of questions at work about strategies for assuring that the markup is semantic, accessible and valid. I recently compiled a short list of Firefox extensions that test whether XHTML is standards-compliant.


Posted in DHTML, Accessibility | 4 Comments »

Software systems as big balls of mud

July 25th, 2008

The critical point to remember about Software Systems as Big Balls
of Mud, is that it is not an anti-pattern. The statement that applying top-down practices to software results in a Big Ball of Mud is an affirmation that


Posted in Code, HTML, Rants | No Comments »

Oops! I accidentally hit the Back button and canceled my attack!

March 19th, 2008

Danny Alan’s demo of Ajax XSS attacks and exploits had to be one of the best talks I went to at Ajax World 2008. Aside from wowing the audience with a demonstration of the power and ease of Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks, he also uttered the most hilarious soundbite of the conference:

In all serious, the CSRF attack toolkit put together by Danny and his colleagues was impressively unsettling.


Posted in Solutions | 12 Comments »

Notes from Ajax World 2008, day 2
 Vats: Communicating Computational Containment, originally uploaded by Noah Sussman.

Overall the emphasis was on XSS attacks and (the problem of) JavaScript security, proposing a “safe subset” of JavaScript; supported by the “adsafe” option in JSLint. A policy of “cooperation under mutual suspicion.” Other memes included “advertising is a mashup.”

The title of this slide was Vats: Communicating Computational Containment. Crockford said that “vats” are the solution to what he calls “the turducken problem.” That is, there is no way to reliably detect the various perfectly permissible variations of JavaScript-inside-HTML-encodeded-as-a-URL.

Posted in Solutions | No Comments »

Hybrid Cab on Mulberry Street
 Hybrid cab, originally uploaded by Noah Sussman.

This is the first hybrid cab I have seen in the city. I think it was a Nissan but I’m bad with make-and-models.

Posted in Trends, Hardware | 4 Comments »