Author Archives: Doug
Looking for a job?
HomeFinder.com (my day job), is hiring a couple software developers, a QA manager, and an Agile Technical Analyst. It’s a great place to work, right in downtown Chicago, full of fun, bright people. Developers get to use the latest … Continue reading
Font not working in IE? Squirrels to the rescue!
Ran across this today – if you’re using @font-face and your fonts are not showing up in IE (yeah, IE, you rule…not), check out the font generator at fontsquirrel. It will give you all the font files you need, … Continue reading
The Twilio Fund and my Accent Training Demo
I’ve been playing around with an idea around an accent training website for the last month or so, and 500 Startups‘ Twilio fund deadline finally got me off my lazy @ss. I finally finished everything for a working demo, … Continue reading
How to Gracefully Use the HTML5 Audio Tag with a Flash Fallback
HTML rocks. It rocks harder than Poison did in the 80’s. That’s some hard rocking. However, browser support is a bit iffy for certain tags. Take the audio tag for example. Not only does Internet Explorer not support … Continue reading
A copy of AuthenticatedSystem has been removed from the module tree but is still active!
What a freakin’ error that is huh? I kept getting it while trying to work on my 3-year old usability testing service. Turns out it’s a conflict with Comatose and rails authentication. Here’s the fix: http://groups.google.com/group/comatose-plugin/browse_thread/thread/284a4a6698a6d9/f698dc284eb1451c?lnk=gst&q=A+copy+of+AuthenticatedSystem+has+been+removed+from+the+module+tree+but+is+still+active!#f698dc284eb1451c Add ‘unloadable’ to … Continue reading
Turkey time with Mechanical Turk, RTurk, and Turkee
A few years ago I launched a website usability testing service called EasyUsability. I haven’t spent a great deal of time on it in the last year or so (day job is keeping me quite busy), but it showed some … Continue reading
Automatically backup your heroku app
Found a great post on how to regularly backup your heroku app, check it out here: http://ultra.bohe.me/post/283128954/back-up-your-heroku-app-with-a-cron-job
Looking for a good Domain Registration API? Try Namecheap.com
I am working on a project that needs to use a domain registration API, and was having trouble finding one. After looking at enom, godaddy, etc., I finally stumbled across Namecheap‘s API, and am happy to report it’s really … Continue reading
Three quick and useful tools
Ever find yourself wanting to check to see if a domain is available? How about having a big blob of xml or json you need to make pretty? Here are three tools I use: To check domain availability – http://www.InstantDomainSeach.com. … Continue reading
SEO, Heroku, Ruby on Rails and removing those darn trailing slashes
One of the rules of the thumb for SEO is to make sure you don’t have any duplicate content. When you talk to SEO experts, they’ll say: DO NOT HAVE ANY DUPLICATE CONTENT! Phew, sorry for the yelling. It turns … Continue reading