jsfiddle is awesome!

http://jsfiddle.net/

I had seen some blog posts on jsfiddle before, but just checked it out for the first time, a great way to experiment with javascript code, comes built in with jquery, mootools and more

Snag-it for the Mac

I have used Snag-it on Windows for many years - it is a great product!

During the last year I have been using Ubuntu and Mac and been missing Snag-it; Shutter on Ubuntu is 'ok', but not quite on the same level as Snag-it

I was happy to discover that there was a beta of Snag-it for the Mac

http://www.techsmith.com/snagitmac/

Free right now, been using it for the last month - it seems even better than the version for windows!

Need to find real estate comps? www.redfin.com

Need to find real estate comps? www.redfin.com is a sweet site. Not only can you search for new homes on the MLS listings but you can also search previous Sale Records. I don't know of any other site that offers the same functionality. Click the 'More Options' link by the 'Search Listings' button.

Another really nice feature, If you find a bunch of homes for sale in a viewable area on the map, click the 'DOWNLOAD' link to get all of the info in excel (csv).

Uptime and performance monitoring made easy - pingdom.com

This is a nice service - http://pingdom.com/

Get an email or SMS alert if your site is not responding. They ping your site from multiple servers in both North America and Europe.

They offer one free account where you can ping a single url or get one of their payed monthly plans if you have additional sites to monitor.

GIMP install on MAC

Don't bother installing GIMP using MacPorts; I started this process and it ran for over an hour before I stopped the install. It has alot of dependencies and MacPorts was busy installing all of them.

Just go to http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html and download the package for your OS version

around 75mb download but installed in minutes :)

sorting rails view with will_paginate plugin

This solution for sorting data on rails index actions does NOT use ajax. Sometimes sorting with ajax is nice but often it is not actually as user friendly; breaking the browser back button, etc...

Disclaimer 1: this code is probably using all kinds of ruby anti-patterns :) - but it is a very simple implementation and so I just went with it...

Disclaimer 2: the title of the post might be a little miss leading as you can use this with or without the will_paginate plugin. In my case I am using it with the will_paginate plugin - and I highly recommend it!

put this file in your rails lib directory /lib/sort_index.rb

in your controller code, set up the SortIndex::Config (you can have more than one if you have multiple actions that need to support sorting

then in your view code render your table headers using the sort object

Does not support the following:

• additional attributes on the anchor tags
• additional attributes on the table header tags
• additional query string parameters - might add this later, would be nice for search results