Blog von fugaL

I’ve often thought about building some killer web app and using advertising and/or affiliate programs to make money off of it. As a user I know how annoying ad-driven applications tend to be. What if the add’s were only relevent to the content of the application? What if they were only presented in a contextual, non-pervasive way? There seems to be a thin line between acceptable ads and annoyances. Unfortunately it’s hard to tell where that line lies. I should think that I could do better than the blatently annoying, but judging by the very small number of not annoying ad-revenue sites perhaps it’s a tough egg to crack. So do you go with a subscription based plan instead? Would people rather pay a fee or see some adds? On the one hand I like the idea of a free service, even if free means a few ads. On the other hand ‘spam’ gives me the willies and I’m not always sure how much better I feel about pay-per-click. Fortunately at the moment I have no killer web app and so the problem lies dormant. Maybe someday there will be a better business model that won’t divide me so.

I was trying to look up some unicode characters and google searches for "unicode this" and "unicode that" weren’t getting the kind of results I wanted. So instead I googled for "unicode lookup" and found this.
This site is just so perfect for a firefox quicksearch. So I added "http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm?preview=entity&q=%s" as a quicksearch bookmark, with unicode as the keyword. Now I’ll never have to fuddle around looking for unicode characters again.

I was looking for something else, but stumbled across this. (praise google!) It’s pdf slides for a pretty awesome looking presentation on rails and ajax. Just looking through the slides opened my eyes to some pretty neat stuff I had no clue about. It’s got some funny pictures, too. It would be nice to see the actual presentation that went with the slides.

My favorite lesson from it: I didn’t have a clue about rjs templates and returning javascript for ajax calls. I’m excited to put these to use.

I use darcs in my rails apps. The combination of the generator creating several files at a time and not including the logs in the repo makes adding the new files cumbersome after a generate.

No worries! Just add ^log(/|$) to the _darcs/prefs/boring file. Now you can darcs add -r * after generates and rest easy.

There it is! I got the rss up and running. http://von.fugal.net/blog/rss gives you a nice feed of the 10 most recent entries. You can also get a topic-wise feed by simply adding / to the end, or even a list of topics seperated by comma. e.g. von.fugal.net/blog/rss/linux,web

Next task, fix the design!

I came across this pretty cool thing while searching for something else. You can style things on :target so as to highlight it, making it much easier to find on a page with many targets not far spaced. Just give an element an id, and when firefox (don’t know what other browsers) when pointed to #id on the end of the url, the :target rules are applied to the element with the id matching the target. You can even hide things by default and display them with :target for a slideshow effect.