Hi Google… Please make creating a folder in Reader easier

[ This is a re-post of my older original article at EchoUser here ]

It’s 7:00 a.m. and I am crammed into a bus packed with commuters.  As I try gingerly to prevent my face from rubbing against the armpit of an adjacent passenger, I awkwardly suspend my clipboard over my head and try to take notes on every aspect of the experience.  You see, while other passengers are traveling to their offices on this bus, for today the bus IS my office.
So why might you ask am I here? It’s …

A recent challenge I faced while working on our product was a requirement that surfaced from a potential client who asked that they be able to use our web-based application as-is, but host their own data internally (in other words, run their own database separate from the one all of our other clients share).
My initial thought was to set-up a second sub-domain (lets call it www2.myapp.com) pointing to our rails application and add a “before_filter” to the ApplicationController that could detect which request.host was being used, and connect to the …

I can’t help but comment on the Tom McCoy article on Interaction Design being a dead-end job.
Interaction Design is certainly no more weak a profession than Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Photography, or any other creative profession. Any single individual could take it upon him or herself to circumvent using a professional and do the work on his or her own using off-the-shelf tools, hacks or just *winging it*.
Frankly I think his blog post is shameless FUD used to gain “link” attention… and Cooper should know better.
I believe all professions evolve …

As one of my rails projects has finally gone to production, one of the more important things I needed consider was how to properly monitor user activity in my application.
Beyond tracking things via google analytics, I wanted to establish some custom log files (beyond spitting everything out into production.log). My first goal: track users that are logging in, and from where.
As I do with most things, I first scour the net for advice so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure I could probably figure it out on my …