Podcast.local – localhost podcasting

May 17, 2009 by Ryan Garver 1 Comment

Last week I discovered a set of mp3′s covering Lean practices and principles.  You can access them here.  I’ve been on a bit of a management optimization stint lately and Lean is a very natural extension of Agile software development in to a broader management context.  It largely predates modern software techniques and represents one of the early generalizations of the Toyota Production System.

In any case that is not what I’m here to talk to you about.  In looking through these mp3′s the list of webinars was not collected in to any sort of podcast format.  This is frustrating because this would be ideal commute time listening on my iPhone.  Out of this frustration came podcast.local.  Podcast.local is a simple Rails application (really simple) that allows you quickly create a podcast through a series of forms.  The name comes from the naming convention provided by the Passenger preference pane on OS X.  If you set it up through the pref pane you will just need to go to http://podcast.local.  From there you can create your podcast one episode at a time and then subscribe to them through your iTunes.  The coole thing is that because it’s on the web iTunes just picks it and starts downloading episodes.

Like I said above, this application is too simple to go in to much detail.  I used it to do some experimentation with a few technologies that I haven’t had much time to mess around with.  Namely Blueprint CSS, jQuery, jQuery UI, and Paperclip.  Enjoy!

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Back to jQuery

February 10, 2009 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

So I tried Red for a while (short while) and was all excited and thought it was really cool and I’d be using it forever. Then I tried to make a Ajax call to a rails app and got back JSON, crap. Red doesn’t support parsing JSON. I eventually figured it out and made a pretty cool billing summary widget using Red. But that took me a few days. And it was really hard. Much harder than it needed to be.

I like what Red was trying to do, but looking back I think I knew it was too good to be true. It’s not quite there and requires a lot of hacking to do most practical things. I’m now using jQuery. I reimplemented the billing summary using jQuery in a couple of hours, and most of that time was spent re-learning jQuery. I’m actually pretty happy with it after using it for a few weeks. I thought I would always return to Prototype.

In my excitement for learning a new tool I discovered the extension jQuery UI and their Themeroller. This has got to be one of the cooler javascript library extensions that I’ve seen. ExtJS tries to provide a will UI toolkit and has a theme API, but the Themeroller for jQuery UI is really sweet and super simple. As a basis for a back office admin it is ideal, and I can see a number of opportunities in a broader set of situations. The icon library alone has made producing simple, intuitive interfaces really easy.

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