It’s been a busy time here at Boost, and we have just released our new web usability testing application IntuitionHQ. I’ll be writing a post about IntuitionHQ soon, but today I’d like to talk about hosting.
When we launched SonarHQ in April we decided to host on Slicehost. There were [...] Continue Reading…
A cluster on IntuitionHQ
Our new product, IntuitionHQ, shows clusters of clicks on an image. To generate these clusters we made use of a gem called Hierclust. The great thing about this gem is it’s simplicity – just input the points and a minimum cluster separation, [...] Continue Reading…
The MacArthur Foundation in the US funds some very interesting digital media and learning initiatives. Last month, they released this video featuring those involved in developing and using the very cool YouMedia space at the Chicago Public Library, which opened in July this year.
It’s an example of how young [...] Continue Reading…
I recently came across FakeFS, which sounds like a great idea for helping to test file functions. However, I did pick up on the following off the website:
[...] it means replacing our mkdir call with a call to mkdir_p won’t break our tests. Because, really, it shouldn’t.
Now I understand [...] Continue Reading…
I recently found squirrel, and I wanted to use it for a project we’re working on to simplify some complex finder statements. Squirrel allows turning something like this:
Task.find(:all,
:conditions => [
'active = ? and (updated_at > cache_version or cache_version IS NULL)', true
]
)
into:
Task.find(:all) [...] Continue Reading…
I’m pretty excited about this. Clive Thompson writes in Wired Magazine 17.09 about Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, and the Standford Study of Writing.
“[Lunsford] has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she [...] Continue Reading…
When writing a Rails application, how do you decide on the best indexes to add to your database? It might seem obvious, especially if you work on a project from scratch. The problem is a little harder when you come to optimize an existing codebase.
New Relic
Recently I’ve been using [...] Continue Reading…
Cross-browser compatibility issues are the bane of web developers world-wide and in this ever shifting landscape it is important to have processes that integrate cross-browser testing in a robust and systematic way. Over the last 9 years we have evolved a robust workflow for web development and cross-browser testing [...] Continue Reading…
Here at Boost we lovingly handcraft our HTML and CSS when implementing our designs. We use text editors rather than programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. We find it’s faster, and it enables us to produce clean, correct code that’s easy to integrate.
Our process starts with the production of the [...] Continue Reading…
