A Website

I've never really loved the will_paginate plugin. Sure, it works right out of the box. And if you stick to the defaults, it's falling-down simple. But that's always been my problem with it: What if I don't want the defaults?

Sure, will_paginate can be modified and customized pretty much any way you want, and we've done so many, many times. But for me, it always felt a bit too abstracted, a bit too opaque.

Enter Paged Scopes, a clever little gem that makes pagination a whole lot cleaner and clearer in my opinion.

What the gem does is very simple: It extends ActiveRecord's already incredibly powerful named scopes by adding pagination- ...

Redid the old slice this a.m., this time with Rails on Passenger and the lightweight web server Nginx. It could absolutely not have been simpler.

Have to hand it to the Phusion guys: Passenger just keeps getting better and better.

Why did I decide to move from Apache to Nginx? We're thinking of moving to an Nginx stack at work, so I figured I'd give it a whirl to see if there are any obvious problems. None so far. And a quick ab benchmarking shows the old blog is purring along faster than before.

Plus, it has a cool-as-hell logo:

More to come.

Yesterday, a friend of mine was awarded the biggest prize in journalism. I can't say I was all that surprised: I've known Matt Waite for a lot of years, and few reporters anywhere have amassed a more impressive body of work than he has. We're talking about a guy who took graduate-level courses and earned the equivalent of a master's degree in order to get a story.

So, as many of us heard the news yesterday that Matt and his colleagues at the St. Petersburg Times had won a Pulitzer for national reporting, the natural reaction was: "It was only a matter of time."

But there's way more to this story and the significance of what happened yesterday cannot really be overstated. I (among others) described it as a "Color of Money" mom ...