Top 6 Resources To Learn Ruby On Rails

In a previous post, we discussed why we are using Ruby On Rails to develop ProductCritic. We're not saying it's the best framework since sliced bread (nothing ever is) but it's fairly easy to learn if you're interested.

With Rail's growing user base, the resources for learning the framework are certainly growing. The following resources are what I am currently considering the best locations of information.

1) Free Original Screencasts

Three free movies that give a great overview and show what the framework can do. Watch them through at full speed to be entertained but then go through them and follow along with your own editor to rebuild the applications yourself.

2) Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition

When just starting out I found it useful to have the print book but it's also available in PDF as well. This book brings together all the components in building an application is really worth the money. It's been recently revised for 1.2 so it should have a reasonable shelf life.

3) The Ruby Way, 2nd Edition

This book provides a huge number of Ruby idioms and examples that I find really useful for learning the "ruby way" of completing tasks. I came from a C++/C# background and found a number of ruby semantics a bit strange at first, specifically blocks. Since the Ruby language allows for completing tasks in any number of ways I like this book to see what the current accepted methods are for certain tasks.

4) Jamis Buck's Blog

Jamis Buck is a core contributor to Rails and employee of 37signals. Out of all the blogs on the net about technical aspects of Rails I find his writing the most interesting and easiest to understand. He is also quite prolific churning out good content at regular intervals.

He also created the Capistrano deployment tool and provides a lot of insight into the tool and deployment in general which is useful.

5) PeepCode Screencasts

These screencasts are very high quality at a very good price. It's like having a veteran rails developer mentor you on a topic that would be rather hard to document in a book. I found the RESTful Rails and Test-First Development for Rails the ones the most useful so far but all of them have been very useful.

6) Programming Ruby, 2nd Edition

Known as the "Pick Axe" because of the cover image this is a great resource and reference for the Ruby Language. I find the Ruby Way more useful for learning how to do a specific task but if I want to understand all the details of the language I refer to this book.

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Quit Boring People With Your Travel Slideshows

I wouldn't say I've travelled extensively (like some of my friends) but I have been to quite a few "exotic" countries (India, Egypt, Turkey, all over east Africa) and have taken gigabytes and gigabytes of pictures (that's one of my pics in this blog post).

I never seem to get around to putting all my pictures together into a nice slideshow that I can burn onto a DVD with nice music to show others though. Everyone has had the experience of going through other people's photos and being bored so it's hard not to feel a bit intimidated when putting a slideshow together of your own travel photos. After all, who wants to bore others?

Brave New Traveller has a good article about Creating Memorable Slideshows. They have some great tips to help you avoid embarrassing yourself:

• Tell A Story
• Use Appropriate Transitions & Movement
• Insert Movie Clips
• Pick A Good Soundtrack
• Avoid Photo Repetition
• Mix Scenery With People
• Keep It Short
• Don't Narrate It

This article is inspiring me to get my photos together into a show...if not for others, at least for myself. The article ends with "When the lights come back on, they will applaud your genius, and wonder when you're going on your next trip". That's the best outcome. I'm only hoping they won't be fast asleep.

The Incredible Story Of Cell Phones

Do you remember when no one had cell phones? How did you tell your friends you'd be late? How'd you tell others where to come find you? How'd you figure out where everyone else was?

Looking around nowadays, it's easy to forget that it wasn't very long ago when almost no one had a cell phone. Going through the cell phone reviews on ProductCritic, it amazes me how far the technology has come in such a relatively short time....especially when you see phones like the Blackberry Pearl or the Nokia 7390 with their huge list of features and functions. The Nokia 7390 has a pretty good 3 megapixel camera included. My first digital camera, the Canon G1 was 3.1 megapixel and it was one of the top-end "prosumer" cameras at that time!

AmericanHeritage.com has a great article detailing the story of the creation of the first "hand-held portable phone" by Motorola. It's a pretty fascinating tale and, as with most good stories, it's about overcoming some incredibly massive challenges (due to a FCC meeting deadline, they had to create the phone in six weeks!) and coming out winners in the end.

I've included a picture of some of their prototypes (image taken from the AmericanHeritage site). It's actually amazing that you can recognize current cell phone form factors in those early prototypes.

The engineers working on this first cell phone for Motorola were definitely pioneers of the first order. I love this exchange that's documented in the article when they first unveiled the prototype and the project to a group of engineers:

“Eyes opened and jaws dropped, because it was really small,” Krolopp remembers. Cooper issued a challenge: “Anybody who doesn’t believe that this can’t be done in time, get up and leave the room.” “With the kind of egos we had in the room,” Krolopp says, “no one got up.”

To the inner-geek in me, that's just awesome. So, stop taking for granted that little phone, camera, mp3 player, clock, browser, pda, and notebook that's in your pocket/purse and read the article to get more appreciation for something that many people can no longer live without.

Who Else Wants To Use PostgresSQL Instead Of MySQL?

In a previous post I mentioned that we use PostgreSQL as our database server. Common sense might indicate that we use MySQL as that is what the core team is using and what would probably be considered to be the defacto standard for Rails development.

So why are we using PostgreSQL?

Probably the biggest reason we use PostgresSQL is the simplest...I like it more than MySQL. This is one of the main reasons why we picked Rails as our development platform. When all things are equal, pick the one that is more enjoyable to use as you're going to be spending lots of time with it and it helps with motivation during those long hours of a startup.

Both databases are perfectly capable and I've used both on live sites but I've always found MySQL to be harder to use from the command line. This may be because I don't know how to use all the features but that's is part of the problem isn't it? Learning PostgreSQL on the command line was very easy and intuitive, MySQL isn't.

The other reason I like PostgreSQL over MySQL is that it's a completely free and open project. With MySQL it feels like it's a commercial project from a business that makes the code available (which it is). There is nothing wrong with this but I feel more comfortable knowing that PostgreSQL ownership is more distributed and that there is no large single point of failure in the project.

If you are picking based on technical issues you'll find a holy war that runs deep for many years about both projects. It seems to boil down that MySQL may be a bit faster but PostgreSQL is more reliable. With the latest revisions of each I'm not convinced that either is true. MySQL seems reliable enough for the millions of sites using it and PostgreSQL is fast enough for our site.

For ProductCritic, either database would have been fine so we picked the database that we find is more enjoyable to work with.

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What Everybody Ought To Know Before Buying A Camcorder

One of the reasons for starting ProductCritic was that I had just bought two cameras; a digital SLR and a point and shoot (Canon 20D and SD500). Doing all the research before buying both cameras drove me nuts.

The reason that ProductCritic also aggregates camcorders and cell phones is that I was also looking to buy both of those products. I did get a cell phone but am still looking for a new camcorder because my old one feels like the picture included in this post.

I have much more knowledge and experience with cameras than I do camcorders which is probably why I still haven't found a camcorder to purchase yet. I also am not exactly sure about all the features that will fit what I want.

Like my previous post about Macworld's article on How To Buy a Digital SLR, PC World has a pretty good article on How To Buy A Digital Camcorder. It has a good breakdown of all the features to look for and even better, a prioritized list of what matters most when evaluating the features. (e.g. weight is more important than microphone placement).

I've been looking at the new camcorders with hard drives and DVD's but from all my research, it seems like camcorders that use miniDV's still provide the highest quality plus have the cheapest, easiest method of long-term storage.

If you have the camera that is pictured in this post (it's a Fisher Price camera!), leave a comment and let me know how it works. I'm interested in what kind of quality you can get out of what some would consider a toy. Does anyone have footage that their kids took? Put it up on YouTube!

ProductCritic Is Definitely For The "Time Poor"

Lightspeed Venture Partners has a blog posting up about the different types of Internet users.

In creating ProductCritic, we didn't actually think in terms of this but given that I put myself in the "Time Poor" camp and the whole reason to create the site was to help others like me, it's not a wonder that "search engines" and "comparison shopping engines" are two examples that are directly linked to why we built ProductCritic.

Our goal is not only to minimize the time that you spend researching products before you buy them, our goal is also to minimize the time you spend on ProductCritic! I know that doesn't sound like such a smart thing to wish for the visitors to your site when you're creating a startup. It actually sounds completely counter-intuitive.

As I've stated in previous posts, the usefulness of ProductCritic is tied directly to how much time we can save people when they research products. That includes spending time on the site itself. Our belief is that if ProductCritic saves you time, then you're more likely to return (when researching other products) and also you're more likely to tell your friends about the site. That's exactly what we want.

This basic philosophy of trying to minimize the time people spend on the site has lead directly to some design decisions like:
1) Making sure all the reviews on a product are all on one page
2) Not paginating the list of cameras. When you ask for a list of them (sorted by name or sorted by score), they all appear on one page. That's actually easier for you than just showing 20 on a page and forcing the user to click "next".

You should think about your basic philosophy of your site. Are you targeting "Time Poor" or "Time Rich" visitors?

Now Is A Great Time To Buy A Digital SLR Camera

I've owned a DSLR camera (a Canon 20D) for a couple years now. I bought it to go on a trip to India and don't regret the price or the cost of the extra lenses one bit. The pictures I'm able to take with the camera make me look like a better photographer without actually being a better photographer!

The camera has been invaluable in capturing pictures of my first kid and again, some of the pictures turn out so fantastic, I'd be happy if a professional captured ones like them. Then again, that's what happens when you take hundreds of pictures in a session...you're bound to get at least one "show quality" photo! That's my strategy, shoot enough quantity so that you get lucky and get some quality.

If you've been contemplating upgrading to a digital SLR, there is no better time than now! There are plenty of good options out right now at very reasonable prices.

In addition to reviewing hardware and software, Macworld, for some reason, also reviews digital cameras (the only "consumer electronics" they review). Normally, the reviews aren't of incredibly high quality (like ones you find at DPReview) and I'm not usually to impressed by them. Regardless, Macworld has posted a great six-page article entitled "How to buy: DSLR cameras" written by Ben Long, author of "Complete Digital Photography" that gives a fantastic overview on what to look for and how to buy a digital SLR. It's kind of like a very short "Buying a DSLR Camera for Dummies".

In addition to providing easy to understand definitions for a variety of terms (ISO, Autobracketing, Histogram display), the article provides great advice for people who may be intimidated buy purchasing a DSLR. Here's a couple of the best pieces of advice:

• "You shouldn't buy a DSLR without handling it first" - all cameras feel different, you need to find one that fits your hand and strength and just feels right in terms of button placement, weight, and balance.
• "Don't sell your point-and-shoot...keep it" - you don't want to carry the DSLR with you in every situation. That's where the compactness of a good point and shoot come in. Very useful...especially with kids. I have the Canon SD500.

Finally, the article lists 5 recommended DSLR cameras that you should look at. I've listed them below along with their ProductCritic scores:

1. Canon Digital Rebel XTi (ProductCritic Score = 85)
2. Nikon D40 (ProductCritic Score = 83)
3. Nikon D80 (ProductCritic Score = 91)
4. Pentax K10D (ProductCritic Score = 90)
5. Sony Alpha A100 (ProductCritic Score = 83)

Although I am a Canon fan, the Nikon D80 and the Pentax K10D are getting overwhelmingly glowing reviews from the professionals and are in the Top 5 rated cameras on ProductCritic.

If you've been waiting to buy a DSLR, why wait any longer? Read the "How To" and go get one! You won't regret it.

CNET Editor's Top 7-Megapixel Cameras

The latest batch of pocket point-and-shoot cameras boast 7-Megapixels of goodness. Of course, lots of megapixels really doesn't mean better pictures but CNET has listed their top 7-Megapixel cameras.

I've listed them below along with each cameras ProductCritic Score (as long as they are listed in ProductCritic).

1. Canon PowerShot SD800 IS (81)
2. Sony CyberShot DSC-T10 (77)
3. Sony CyberShot DSC-T50 (79)
4. Canon PowerShot A710 IS (83)
5. Sony CyberShot DSC-T30
6. Canon PowerShot A550
7. Nikon Coolpix S7c
8. Kodak EasyShare V705 (75)
9. Sony CyberShot DSC-H5 (78)
10. Canon Powershot SD550 (85)

It's always interesting to me how CNET rates their products compared to the summary score that we calculate from all the professional reviews on the Internt. Note that the 10th spot on CNET's list is the best rated of them all according to the ProductCritic Score. I think the SD550 is a great camera so I'm not surprised it's actually got the best reviews from experts. I'm also not surprised that Kodak has the lowest score of the ten.

Finally, this list points to me three cameras that are missing from ProductCritic! That's embarassing. In our effort to be as complete as possible, we'll be adding the review summaries for these missing cameras within a day or two.

Remember that ProductCritic doesn't just use an automated spider to get all the reviews. Our experience is that the results of automated spiders do not produce the results we want (missing reviews, duplicate reviews, reviews without scores, etc). We want to set ProductCritic apart by making the results as meaningful as possible. After all, how are you supposed to make the right shopping decision if you can't trust the completeness of the reviews?

By the way, if you've had a chance to visit ProductCritic, let us know what you think? Has it helped you? What's good about it? What would you like to change? Are we missing a product you're interested in?

Testing Great Firewall of China

John Chow just posted a blog entry about his very successful blog being blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Well, I decided to go and try it out to see if either this blog or ProductCritic (the main site) was also blocked.

From the results, it looks like ProductCritic is available (yay!) but for some reason this blog is blocked. I've included both images from the test result.

I'm not sure how much I can believe the results because Google Analytics shows that I've been getting hits from within China to this blog. Maybe the analytics data is wrong? Also notice that in the 'available' image, at the bottom, it actually says that the last test was 'blocked'. Something is definitely odd with this test.

It's not that big of a deal to me as access to the main ProductCritic site from China is what is actually important to me.

Why You Need A Guest Blogger

We've committed to posting a blog entry at least 4 times a week. So, where were we last week? Well, Gerry is away on vacation and I've been sick.

Although we've only been doing this for a short time, it really highlights the need for every blog that is trying to be professional to prepare for a guest blogger during the times that you just can't post and entry!

Are You A Linux Geek? You'll Love These Phones

The Ministry of Tech blog has a post listing The 5 Hottest Phones for Linux Fanatics. All these "phones" are built on the Linux platform and in theory, should enable communities to be created around them to customize their functionality.

Listed below are the phones (and their ProductCritic Score if available):

1. FIC Neo1973
2. Sony mylo (ProductCritic Score = 67)
3. ROAD S101K HandyPC
4. Motorola A1200 (ProductCritic Score = 83)
5. Grundig B700

The Motorola A1200 (also known as the "Ming") has pretty good reviews but the Sony mylo has quite mixed ones. This is probably because the mylo really isn't a phone in the traditional sense in that you can only make calls if you're connected via Wi-fi and use Skype...it doesn't have the traditional cell phone capabilities (and therefore the monthly fees or contracts).

Our Simple And Free Method For Submitting Sitemaps

Creating sitemaps for your site is a very important part of ensuring that the search engines can spider your site easily and know the most about its pages. You can view ProductCritic's sitemap at http://www.productcritic.com/sitemap.xml

At ProductCritic, we mostly care about Google and Yahoo! since these two sites combine for more than 80% of the search traffic to the site. If you have not done so already, you should set up your sites at both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Once you've set up your sites and verified that you own them (I've found that the easiest way to do this is to upload their generated html file to your site vs using a meta-tag), it's time to create and upload a sitemap.

When we first launched the main site, we tried some free sitemap generators (just do a search at Google and you'll find a ton of them). The free online one that we found was the best was XML-Sitemaps.com. Still, I found it a pain to generate it online, download the resulting files, and then upload them to our server. Also, while free, XML-Sitemaps.com only has a 500 URL limit.

So, I found a Windows application that does the job very quickly, is FREE and has a ton of advanced features if you want to use them. It's called GSiteCrawler and can be found at http://gsitecrawler.com/. The author, John Mueller, lives in Switzerland and works on the software on the side. Although he offers the software for free, I definitely believe that once you use it, you will want to make a donation to him for the time and effort he's devoted to the project.

Once you install it, just "Create A New Project" and it will walk you through a mere four screens in its New Project Wizard. Using the wizard, you have tons of options to tell it what type of files and urls to crawl on your site. You can choose file extensions of files you want crawled, images, and videos. You can also choose to upload the sitemaps directly to your ftp server once the files have been generated. See the options you have in the four screencaps that follow.




Once you have generated your sitemaps and uploaded them to your site, you need to let Google and Yahoo! know that there is a new sitemap that the search engines should use to crawl your site.

Do this on Google Webmaster Tools by choosing the "sitemap" tab and either "Add a Sitemap" link at the top right or once you've added it, just select that file (click on the box next to the sitemap name) and click on the "Resubmit Selected" button.

For Yahoo! Site Explorer, click on the "Manage" button next to the sitename and add the name of the sitemap file (usually "sitemap.xml") to the feed.

It's quite simple and you should make a point of updating your sitemap when there's new content for the search engines to crawl.

How To Save A Wet Cell Phone

Just a quick post today...hopefully a useful one. I think there's two camps of cell phone users, those that take real good care of their phone and those like me who drop their cell phone a lot. As I type, my phone currently has a huge crack across its front and its been there for quite awhile now. I should replace it but nothing else is wrong with the phone! The LCD works just fine (both exterior and interior) so I just keep using it.

OK, maybe I'm also lazy and cheap.

Anyways, in my regular dropping of my cell phones, occasionally it happens in the middle of the street on a rainy day. Lucky for me, so far, it hasn't fallen directly into a puddle. If it does, the warranty is void and the phone company knows what you did.

But, if you're not so lucky and it happens to you (or your kid throws it into the toilet), have a look at this article on wikiHow that provides as much help and instruction as possible on how to save it (if it can be saved).

I Have A Lot More To Learn About Adsblacklist

So I've been using AdsBlackList for a little while now. Actually, more to the point, I've been putting MFA (Made For Ads) sites on my Google Adsense Competitive Ad Filter list and just using AdsBlackList to keep track of all the MFA sites I see on ProductCritic.

I've read a few blog posts and related comments about it not working or reducing overall revenue. I'm not sure I've seen a reduction in revenue yet (still too early to tell) but I might try an experiment in the second week of March to see what happens when I remove the sites on the Ad Filter list.

Still, I'm debating with myself because my main purpose for putting those sites on the list is not just for increasing revenue (since some posts say that Google already puts in the highest paying ads automatically since that's the best for Google...which makes sense). My main purpose for putting the sites on my filter list is that I hate MFA sites and everything they stand for and I think that I'm doing a disservice to people visiting ProductCritic if they click on an Ad and it takes them to a completely useless site for them. I know, as a visitor of many sites myself, that if I exit a site, I'd sure like to go somewhere that is also as useful as the site I just came from. Why would I want anything that creates a bad user experience? I think the quality of the sites that advertise on your site reflect on the quality of your site overall (even subconsiously) to a visitor.

Anyways, I'm going to run my experiment in a couple weeks. If I actually get more revenue by removing the MFA sites, I have a bigger dilemma....but I think I already know what I'm going to choose either way.

What would you do if you found that MFA sites brought you more revenue but reflected lower quality on your site?