Rails for designers

Rails can be difficult to get to grips with. I am still having trouble. Kevin Clark has come to the rescue.

Kevin Clark has put together a wonderful little article on Rails aimed at designers. It covers the parts important to the rendering of pages. It is an excellent starting point even if you aren’t a designer.

JavaScript Bibliography

I really like it when people provide all the sources that they used when writing an article or tutorial. It would be nice to have a plugin that helped you do this when writing.

A couple of days ago I was having a chat with Alex, one of the people I work with. We were talking about blogging and Wordpress and how it was nice when people provide a list of related links and sources used to write an article.

Alex put together a some JavaScript which looks at the body of your article and makes a list of all the links.

The only thing is some of the sources may not have been mentioned in the article. These would probably need to be put in a custom field or entered manually into the article body.

Another possibility would be to use the links section to archive sources and general links (whether they were used or not) and attach appropriate ones to an article.

Layout

Not as soon as I had hoped. Here are some useful resources I have come across on my travels that I found very helpful.

I have never really had any training in graphic design and as such am always trying to improve the way I design. Garret Dimon has written a nice article at YourTotalSite which gives some useful tips for design on the web.

Mark Boulton is another person who has some very useful wisdom to share. Mark has written a collection of articles on the subject of layout for print and the web. Since reading them I have applied the knowledge only to find that the whole process was quicker, more enjoyable and produced great results.

Here’s a list of Mark’s articles.

I hope you find them as useful as I did.

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