The tiled pattern background is and always has been a staple design technique. My first recollection of the trend was the faithful (but desperately unoriginal) company name slanted and tiled behind the wrapper area. Faceparty was probably the most famous for using this effect. Similar social sites sprang up, overused the fad and it inevitably died out.
Then came the rise of what can only be described as the 70s wallpaper look. The highly detailed, often floral, Damask tiles (scroll for multiple examples) were again often used to decorate the expanse either side of the wrapper on many sites. Personally, I am quite glad that they were not often used in the content areas of (professional) sites or we may all have ended up with eye strain.
So elaborate tiles came and went. I did appreciate the effort that went into these (art?)works, but they just didn’t appeal to my younger minimalistic taste at the time. I’d love to hear how others felt about this particular blend of pattern.
Following in their footsteps (and still the almighty pattern today) came the geometric tiled background. Popularised by the initial ‘a-listers’ in web-standards (Andy Budd and Cameron Moll spring to mind), geometric tiled patterns (and pixel patterns) have become as popular as gradients and drop shadows. So popular in fact that many free patterns are available, from resources such as Squidfingers. This, coupled with many a tutorial on tiled pattern design further escalated the trend. Normally, I’d hate a trend to get overused and stale, but most uses of geometric patterns seen today seem to be subtle and well balanced.
Talking of today, where are patterns at now? End of the road? Certainly not. I’m seeing a growing trend of people using hybrid patterns. Let me explain by use of a couple of examples.
Both examples breathe life into patterns. When seeing them for the first time they wowed me. I hope that more of these hybrids appear and innovative uses of patterns become more widespread.
If you care to inform myself and your fellow readers, why not let us know of any clever patterns that you have found. Or state where you think patterns will go next.
Disclosure: This is a paid review. Saying that, all our reviews are honest. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.
The book Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications (Patrick Lenz) aims to take the beginner Ruby on Rails developer on a practical journey through the Ruby on Rails environment and will offer the reader a step-by-step real-world project along the way. Doing exactly as it says on the tin, by the end of the book you will have built your first RoR web app. Hurrah!
The book reads as a guide to creating modern websites/apps in a fun way instead of a tedious manual detailing every command available without any practical advice.
Put simply, the majority of newcomers to Ruby on Rails would get a great benefit from this book. It not only provides worthwhile content for a seasoned programmer new to RoR, but guides (and focuses on) the less programmatically minded (inlcuding front-end designers) through the development environment in an interactive, hands-on way.
From sitepoint:
This book will:
- show you how to install Ruby on Rails on Windows, Mac, or Linux
- walk you, step by step, through the development of a Web 2.0 social news application, just like digg.com
- show you how to test, debug, benchmark, and deploy your Rails application
It’s a bold claim. But given sitepoint’s ultra-usable approach, let’s see if Patrick can pull it off…
For the purpose of this review, I intend to guide you through the first 4 chapters (of 12) of Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications.
Chapter 1: Introducing Ruby on Rails
The first chapter discusses the RoR environment. The reader is informed of the pros of the framework, what full-stack is and how all of this fits together to form web applications. A little daunting for some, if it weren’t for the plain English describing the Rails environment.
Of course, the Ruby language is covered and the history of RoR is explained. Handily, this chapter introduces the factors that make RoR different. (Hint: The ethos is to make life easier but still flexible for the developer.)
All of this is really is about setting the scene and motivating the developer. The developer now understands the RoR framework and can get stuck into that first web app.
Chapter 2: Getting Started
The most important chapter in this book for some. I have aimed to complete many projects in various environments but, alas, I fell at the first hurdle. I understood the programming environment to some degree, I just couldn’t actually set it up!
This chapter is a Godsend. The following packages are defined in Layman’s terms and the rationale for installing them is also included:
An installation walkthrough is then offered for Windows, Linux and Mac users (top marks there). Expecting page after page of install procedures? Sorry to disappoint. There’s only a few pages for each operating system.
Follwing the install procedure, a file structure guide, an application start walkthrough and advice on which text editor to choose is offered.
Thorough. Thoroughly happy.
Chapter 3: Introducing Ruby
Ruby is defined in this chapter, but not dwelled upon. I think that the key here is balance. Too much information about Ruby here could send a potential RoR developer off the rails.
OOP in a general sense is introduced and a basic understanding of its merits are given. This is probably overkill for a more seasoned programmer but I guess the beginner would welcome this. The theory of how OOP works in Ruby is explained in great detail. One could say that reading this alone could give you a good insight into Ruby.
A nice touch in this chapter is the listing of how Ruby outputs code using the interactive ruby shell. This is surely trivial to some but it might just prevent hours of head scratching.
Chapter 4: Rails Revealed
Explaining Ruby without explaining Rails would be silly.
Three Rails environments are defined (development/test/production) giving an insight into actually how to use Rails in a commercial sense. Kudos to Patrick for explaining that three databases are needed (one for each environment) and what data to use.
Luckily for new RoR developers, guidance is given on how to test the Rails environments and also how to debug them. Not that we’d need to. ;)
By now, an understanding of how the Digg-like web app you’ll be building is apparent. Over the next 8 chapters, you’ll have built a Digg of your own.
I honestly have to say a big thumbs up to the author. The flow of the book is logical and appeals to not only novice RoR developers but novice developers full stop. Including detailed setup guides was a stroke of genius and will aid many a confused RoR newcomer, I’m sure.
My only concern would be the length of the book. Some may be put off. But that’s also the books fortĂ©. It provides thorough background information throughout but still keeps to the clean reader-friendly approach of sitepoint books of late.
Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications
A while ago I did a post about a site that was getting the malware interstitial on Google. They said “We don’t have any bad software on our domain” and I was all, like, “Psst, buddy, check out these urls.” But that’s not really a scalable approach. 
Now the webmaster console team has added a “please show me some urls that Google thinks are bad” feature. Much more scalable, and it should be a big help to webmasters that might have gotten a few pages hacked. I’ve updated my original post and said:
Looks like the webmaster console team has now added example urls for sites that we think are hosting malware. This is a great step to give webmasters more tools to self-diagnose any malware-related issues with their site. As always, thanks to the folks who added this feature.
Not much more to say about it. If you do see that malware interstitial page for one of your sites, hit Webmaster Central to get more info. Barry’s got a bit more detail up about it over here as well.
I’m mostly caught up on my feeds. It was relatively quiet the last couple weeks, but I’ve seen 2-3 things I wanted to talk about in the last couple days or so.
First, WebProNews ran this post that claims that Google is selling PageRank 7 links.
My quick take: when you dig into it, it turns out that it’s a Google directory of enterprise companies that can do things like write plug-ins for proprietary data types for the Google Search Appliance, merge geospatial GIS data, and integrate telephony products with Google Apps. This is a program for enterprise companies, and I don’t think anyone has even suggested before now that this directory could be construed as selling links, but just to avoid even the appearance of anything improper, I’ve already submitted a change to ensure that there’s no PageRank benefit from these links. I left a comment on the original post; I wish that WebProNews would show comments on their blog partner program. Right now, someone would read that article, but wouldn’t know that there are any comments (including mine) on the original post.
Next, Elinor Mills wrote about an interesting allegation. I’ll include the whole content of the allegation: [Just to clarify, this is an allegation that Elinor is passing on from a newsletter, not a claim that Elinor is making herself directly.]
In the past, when you launched a website, or Google wasn’t picking up your stuff, you could call the friendly people over there and they’d look at your website to see if you were legit, look at their search results, and adjust their code appropriately. It used to be this all occurred in the same day. Then it was 24 hours. So, imagine our dismay when www.wesrch.com wasn’t even being picked up two weeks after we launched. We had called Google two days into the launch and they apologized, saying their search engines were backlogged with so many sites to monitor. We called after a week and then called again and again, with no better answer. We even tried posting ads with Google and they couldn’t find us. “Clearly, we had tried their patience, as in the end they threatened to BLACKLIST our websites so no one would ever find us again. Now is that power or what? Funny thing is, Yahoo found us faster and more reliably. So, Google is no longer my home page. More importantly, they are showing all the signs of a monopolist trying to forcibly extract revenues for nothing. Whenever this happens, it’s a sign that revenue growth has peaked and they are trying to force it in order to maintain high stock valuations. So watch out if you are an investor
When Elinor asked for a comment about this, several of us read the original complaint, and I have to admit that we were perplexed. Google doesn’t provide phone support for webmasters; as Vanessa Fox recently noted, over 1 million webmasters have signed up for our webmaster console alone, so offering phone support for every site owner in the world wouldn’t really scale that well. They talk about buying ads later in the paragraph; we wondered “maybe they were talking to phone support for AdWords?” But I can’t imagine anyone at Google on the ads side or anywhere else saying our search engines were backlogged with too many sites to monitor. The Google index is designed to scale to billions of webpages, and it does that job pretty well. It’s even harder for me to imagine anyone at Google saying on the phone that they would “BLACKLIST our websites so no one would ever find us again,” because again, we don’t provide webmaster support over the phone, and I believe AdWords phone support would know better than to claim our index was backlogged or to threaten to remove anyone’s site from our index. Maybe a call to AdWords support reached such a fever pitch that a representative declined to run an ad?
At any rate, I’m sorry for any negative interactions that wesrch.com had with Google. The current description of the issue doesn’t give enough concrete details to check out, but if anyone from that domain wanted to clarify or to provide emails or dates/times/names of phone calls (did they call AdWords? Randomly try to hop into the Google phone tree? Talk to a receptionist?), I’d be happy to try to look into it more.
In the absence of more details about their interaction, I tried to dig more into the crawling of wesrch.com. I didn’t see any negative issues (no spam penalties or anything like that) for the domain. I saw attempts to crawl the site as far back as October 2006, but that earliest attempt got an authentication crawl error (that would have been a 401 or a 407 HTTP status code). I believe that this allegation went out Feb. 2nd, and I believe we had at least one page from that site at that point. I did notice that visiting the root page of the domain gives a 302 (temporary) redirect to the HTTPS version of the domain. That’s kinda unusual, but we should still be able to crawl that.
The other thing to look at is current coverage. Here’s what I saw:
| Search Engine | Number of pages |
| over 450+ pages | |
| Yahoo | 1 page |
| Live | about 176 pages |
| Ask | 0 pages |
(Note that if you just do [site:wesrch.com] on MSN/Live, you might get results estimates as high as 500+ results, but the way to verify results estimates is to go to the final page of results, and MSN/Live stops after 176 results.)
It looks like Google crawls wesrch.com at least as deeply as any other major search engine. I’m still confounded who the folks at wesrch.com could have talked to at Google, but I’ll leave open the offer to dig into it more if they want to provide more details. And I’ll wish them well for their new domain in the future.
Moving on, I got a kick out of this one. In the “can’t win for losing” department, there’s this post. Someone going by the handle “earlpearl” pointed out a thread to Barry Schwartz, in which someone reported that Google Maps had incorrect info for Duke Medical Center. The good news is earlpearl mentions a few hours later that the info has been corrected. Everybody’s happy, right? Nope, someone with the handle INFO (which I think is the same person as earlpearl) posts to the thread and says:
I see that Google Maps corrected this information in one day. I’m still
trying to learn how the bad information I submitted can be corrected.Looks to me like Google only responds to large institutions!
So Google got criticized for having bad info for a medical center. It sounds like someone at Google took action quickly, but then we got criticized for only responding to large institutions. Personally, I think if you’re going to correct bad information, medical centers are one of the first places I would tackle. There is an ironic twist on this. I think earlpearl/INFO is partially frustrated because they’ve reported outdated info regarding some bartending schools, and that data hasn’t been changed yet. But the twist is that earlpearl’s thread about bartending schools has gotten two personal responses from a Google employee (”Maps Guide Jen”). Jen’s most recent reply struck me as pretty responsive:
Hey XXXX,
Thank you so much for all this detailed information. We’ll look into your
reports further to try and track down where our data might be outdated. I
definitely appreciate your taking the time on this!Cheers,
Jen
My hope is that we’ll check into earlpearl’s report as well and then everyone will be happy.
Those were 2-3 semi-negative posts that I wanted to give a quick take on. Just so that people don’t get down thinking that every post is negative about Google, here’s a really interesting post by Bill Slawski of SEO by the SEA. Bill pulls together mentions of twelve different Googlers who have made nice contributions to Open Source or open standards. I know of several other Googlers who help open-source projects and who aren’t on that list; it’s good to be reminded that Google contributes to the open source movement in a lot of ways.
Update: Clarified the post to note that Elinor didn’t write the allegation I quote up above; she found it from a newsletter and is passing it on to her readers. Thanks for pointing out that my language wasn’t clear, Philipp.
