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I admit, Ruby’s Interpreter isn’t the fastest one around, and whilst there are alternative interpreters that are promising blazing speeds, there are thankfully some things you can do to speed up what we already have. igvita.com has a list of 6 Optimisation Tips for the Ruby MRI. There are a couple of surprising ones in there.

Whilst on the topic of speed, using static pages for any pages that need to be, well, static is always a good idea. Railscast has a new screen cast entitles Semi-Static Pages.

If are a Capistrano n00b, or you have been meaning …

The next frontier in front-end web development tools is performance measurement and reporting.

At the O’Reilly Velocity Conference Scott Ruthfield, VP of Engineering & Technology at WhitePages.com, gave a talk titled ‘Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation‘ and revealed Jiffy, a web application interface performance measuring and reporting tool. Jiffy captures performance measurements for any specified event at the client’s end, storing them in a database, and reporting on them.

At the same conference Bill Scott, Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, in his presentation ‘Improving Netflix Performance‘, talked about an internal …

Last week there were lots of announcements and the odd bit of controversy in the ‘ol CFML blogosphere… this week, not so much. However, I do have some tasty code posts for you and some even tastier open source news – bon appetit!

Code

Interested in learning object-oriented programming? Join Ben Nadel as he builds a photo gallery application using OO techniques – and knowing Ben’s hands-on learn-as-you-go blogging style, this will be comprehensive!
Nick Tong shares a code snippet to export the contents of a table into a CSV file, using the Java StringBuffer
Rupesh Kumar from Adobe’s engineering team in …

Today we published the first in our series of SitePoint Community Interviews with renowned designers, entitled Mark Boulton’s Freelance Design Secrets.

In the interview, Andy Kowalik, one of our mentors on the SitePoint Forums talks to UK-based designer Mark Boulton about how he got started in design, how he made the leap from salaried employee to business owner, and picks Mark’s brains on grid theory, typography, and other peculiarities of design on the Web.

Go read it now!

Is there a web designer you’d like to see us interview? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll track …

You often hear people extolling the virtues of multitasking: you get more done, It’s the way of the future.

Balls.

Multitasking is great if you want to fill your time doing a lots of things not very well, over a long period of time. Sure you can: flicking between checking your email, Twittering, writing a report, trying a new web app and chatting on Facebook. Are you busy? Probably. Are you productive? Probably not.

As I see it, there are two key problems here:

Doing non essential tasks
Due to procrastination and self-distraction you are putting off certain tasks, by doing everything else …

We conclude our first ever CSS-themed week with a classic article that collates the most important CSS positioning properties.

Nigel Peck’s article CSS Positioning Properties At-A-Glance Guide was first published back in 2003, but five years later still stands strong as a compact summary of the basics of CSS positioning (although we updated a few points before republishing). In fact, the concept of this article formed the basis for the SitePoint CSS Reference, which was then expanded to include the HTML Reference, and we have a JavaScript Reference under development, so the article was quite seminal from our …

Why should Olympic athletes have all the fun?

If you’re a regular in our marketplace then you’ll want to keep an eye on this competition — the World Championships of Web Site Flipping are happening (a first for the site flipping industry, I believe), proudly sponsored by SitePoint.

Check out all of the contenders that have been spotlighted on the site — nothing really in there to suggest the talents of these flipping warriors, but fun if only to put some real faces to names in the site flipping industry.

There are a stack of prizes on offer — up …

Usability is an inexact science, but I’m pretty sure there is at least one golden rule that is non-negotiable, and that’s this:

Never, ever, insult your users.

Unless your web site revolves around insults, and every error message consists of a purposefully engineered insult for humorous reasons, treating your users with disdain or disrespect is a huge no-no.

Earlier today I decided to sign up for reddit, the popular social bookmarking service. My experience has turned me right off the service. Here’s my rant:

1. The CAPTCHA

First, I clicked Submit Link, and was presented with an option to register.

I’m personally not …