Nice downloadable example of balloon tooltips.

Website: http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichScript=bubble_tooltip

Pop-Up windows are a pain in the lower back to use. Years of abuse by advertisers, malicious attackers and phishing attempts have conditioned users to close them immediately or turn on their third party pop-up blocking tool or the browser option to do the same.n

Website: http://www.onlinetools.org/tools/dominclude/

We’ve got the language, we’ve go the killer Rails framework, but we’re not quite there yet when it comes to performance. And building applications that scale is tricky in any language. So how do we solve is the Ruby way? How do we make it possible without unnecessary complexity?

Website: http://www.squidoo.com/rubyscale/

lighttpd 1.4.8 was just released and next to a pile of bugfixes we added a new option to fastcgi.server to allow a simple setup of multiple rails app in one virtual host.

Website: http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2005/11/23/lighttpd-1-4-8-and-multiple-rails-apps

In most cases the news is presented in a rather boring but usable way. Newsmap show us a new way to look at world trends in news reporting through their Google News mashup. As they say on their website, “It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.” One other aspect of Newsmap that was a great user experience was the instant language translation. Newsmap will be one of my daily reads from now on. “

RTOC is an statistics script that uses flatfiles to store data. It includes an onine users counter as well as a unique hits counter that stores unique hits for that day aswell as a total. It uses JavaScript to update itself dynamicly, so that all stats are in real-time!

Website: http://www.ajaximpact.com/detail_news.php?id=18

I’ve been implementing some AJAX goodness in Mayday and other FastFrame apps lately. In my reading of the various pitfalls of AJAX one that popped up repeatedly was how to handle gracefully a network outage or the webserver going down. For example, Gmail’s chat handles it nicely. When I turn off my airport connection Gmail chat lets me know that it can’t contact the server and maybe my connection is down. Much better than an endlessly spinning hour glass, or worse, not letting the user know their action was never completed.

Website: http://codejanitor.com/wp/ajax-timeouts-with-prototype/

Stage 2 contains MySQL tuning tips, tuning of FastCGI dispatchers, and further system optimization techniques.

Website: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/20/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-2

While a couple of high-traffic sites are being powered by Rails and while the Rails book has a handful of instructions to scale your application, it was apparent for us that you’re on your on at a certain point. This series of articles is meant to serve more as a case study as opposed to a generic “How To Scale Your Rails Application” piece of writing, which may or may not be possible to write. I’m outlining what we did to improve our applications’ performance, your mileage may obviously vary.

Website: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/13/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-1

This is for designers who are going to be working with Rails and is intended to give them a good starting point to jump into work with a Rails developer. This is all introductory material. As such, I cover some basics (MVC, locations of files) and move from there to a code example and more advanced topics (partials, ActionView helpers).

Website: http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/03/21/rails-for-designers