It’s an internal DSL, meaning it uses plain Ruby syntax, like this:

Output:

Being just Ruby, of course, you can mix in variables, arithmetic, require external code, hit the database, or whatever.

The guys on the Tulsa.rb mailing list have provided some great feedback, and from that I’ve released the the second gem version (0.2.0). If this looks interesting to you, head over to the GitHub project and check it out. Please let me know what you think.

irb
> require 'rubygems'
> require 'dnssd'

moar funny pictures

To get Prototype to run after squeezing it through ShrinkSafe, you need to put back every instance of the variable $super. ShrinkSafe replaces variable names with shortened versions, and because of some Prototype voodoo, it breaks on this one name. There are about 8 places you’ll find it, and unfortunately, it takes some manual hunting once ShrinkSafe has changed a bunch of names, but there you have it.

I suppose someone smarter than I could tweak ShrinkSafe to ignore this variable name, but for me, this works.

As an experiment, I left off the pagination links. In this app, there is no “next page.” Instead, if the results are not on the first page, then the user must refine their search.

If you think about it, how often do you scroll through a Google search results page and then choose to change your search query rather than click on the next page? If you’re like me, a lot. Even if you do click the next page, I would bet you don’t click much past page 2.

For users who see the Web and web apps as a necessary evil, they might be more apt to page through thousands of results rather than think about what they’re looking for and change the query. Ditching the pagination links lights up a different part of the brain I would guess (of course I have no idea considering I am only a web geek).

What do you think? Am I evil? Can it work?

By the way, I haven’t had any complaints yet. We’ll see…

https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new?referrer=198350528

Of course, all you need to know is on the website, but in short, it’s a beginner’s conference all about Ruby and Rails. If you’re new to Ruby and/or Rails, this is for you (if you’re in or near enough to Tulsa, Oklahoma that is). Tell everyone you know!

My only beef was the new fancy address bar… Being an uber web geek, I tend to recognize things by their URLs instead of page titles, so this was slowing me down to much:

So, to get things back all barebones FF2 style, I installed this and set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped in about:config to true. Much better.