I got my first glimpse of site catalyst which came after an evening of playing with AWStats preceeded by an evening of playing with Google Analytics. I publicly proclaim that I am not an expert in any of these areas, I’ve simply been able to give them a test drive and here are my initial reactions to the three. AWStats You’d be absolutely amazed if you knew the extent to which our online activities are [...]

Why do I love Rails so much? Because there is so much to love! Who ever dreamed that creating web services could be so simple? Where other frameworks can consume them very simply, Rails defines simplicity when it comes to creating them. Consuming them is easy as well, but it’s on the creation side that Rails really stands out from the competition. So how do you do it? First off, let me say that my [...]

I wrote a few days ago about web services. Those writings were based on some preliminary research and class discussions. Since then I’ve had a little spare time to sit down and play them a bit, and even was able to whip up my own little web service in Rails. I’ll provide a HowTo as another article, but wanted to give my definition a bit of a refinement after some personal experience. Any programmer is [...]

No doubt you’ve heard about web services, but what exactly are they? I’ve had teachers and others try to get this into my brain for at least the last three years, but it was only lately in a discussion about service-oriented architecture that it finally began to make sense. Let me lay these two topics out as simply as I can to see if I can make sense of it. One of the problems with [...]

So now that I’m really starting to get serious about this whole blogging thing, I’m suddenly interested in driving traffic to my site. I think this is partially a result of some of the things I’m learning in class. In support of my efforts I’m now joining Technorati. When I asked a friend about Technorati, he described it as “Google for Blogs.” With that kind of an endorsement, how can I resist? With this in [...]