I always hated printing confirmation pages from web sites. Printing a piece of paper that’ll end up in the recycle bin in a few weeks is just silly. There are also times that I’m not connected to a printer and I really need to save a copy of something I’m viewing.
My answer for the past few years has been PDFCreator, install it and whenever you print, you can print to a pdf file instead of a printer. This month alone I think I’ve printed one paper page from my printer and about 90 pages to PDF form.
I also used PDF creator to email proof pages for our daughter’s yearbook to teachers. In the past printouts would be made for each teacher, they would mark them up and send them back. I’ve easily saved a ream of paper this year by doing this via email. Not to mention its easier to manage email than paper.
Once installed, just use it like a printer. It will show up as a printer in the print dialog.
From there it will ask you for a title and then a name for your pdf. If you want to make a hardcopy later you can just print the pdf file you created.
March 24th, 2008
Over the past few years my Blockbuster subscription fee has increased and the number of in store exhanges allowed has decreased. At the same time my queue is running on empty. At 1st there were tons of movies I wanted to see but now I’m caught up and I don’t have the desire to rent more than 1 move a week.
What are 4 movies a month worth? If I use Redbox those 4 movies will cost me $4 (if I return them in 24 hours). With Blockbuster Online only the cost is $9 (no in store exhanges).
Sure I can keep the blockbuster movies as long as I want but I only watch them once and why not just grab one when I know I have time to watch it.
The trouble with Redbox in the past was that you never knew what was going to be in the box when you got there. They recently made my local Redbox part of their online rental system so that problem is solved.
There is a remaining issue that I hope Redbox is working on. There are frequently people browsing movies when you get to the box. You need to wait for them to finish before you can return a movie or pick up your movie, that you ordered online. They should have an online pickup and return slot on the side so those of us impatient people don’t need to pace around behind the people browsing titles. 
Bye Bye Blockbuster. I suspect next year I’ll be able to dump Comcast an use Antenna and the web for my television consumption.
March 12th, 2008
After I blogged about building a sitemap for Rails I contacted Mike Clark and asked him if he thought it would make a good Recipe for his upcoming book, Advanced Rails Recipes. He thought it was a good fit and it is currently in the Beta version of the book.
I wrote up my notes in the Recipe format, then Mike basically rewrote it for Rails 2.0 and added some additional content. Thanks Mike! I almost feel bad being cited as the author since after editing it is drastically different from the original.
The core concepts are still there and some thoughts were dropped since Recipes should be short. So, Here are some elaborations..
The Ping Protocol
There is a warning in the book about excessively pinging to Google to have them read your sitemap. I would recommend letting search engines crawl your sitemaps at their own speed. The ping example in the book was a nice overview of when to use an Observer and also provided complete coverage on how to submit sitemaps. Please use ping sparingly, if at all.
Sitemaps with over 50,000 entries
I work on sites where we use siteindex files because we submit well over 50,000 URLs to the search engines. I didn’t provide an example on how to build these in Rails because I’m not sure they provide any value to the typical site.
My theory is that if you build a sitemap with the 50,000 pages that were most recently updated you will give the search engines all they need. If a page isn’t updated for a while and it falls off the list is that really a problem? If the page was worth anything someone externally would be linking to it before it fell off the list. Now if your site is creating millions of pages a day this may not be the case.
If your pages are islands (no links to them) and you’re afraid they won’t be found unless they are all in the sitemap, I would suggest building the sitemap via a rake task that is kicked off via a cron job. This will also give you an opportunity to gzip the files. I’ll try to writeup some example code for the this when I find some free time.
Do I really need a sitemap?
If your site has navigation to all its pages, then a sitemap will probably not benefit you. I suggest checking what pages the search engines have in their index and if key content is missing then pursue a sitemap. Even if they are finding all your pages a sitemap certainly couldn’t hurt.
Just in case you didn’t know how to find the pages Google knows about on your site you can simply type site:youdomain.com in the Google or Yahoo search box.
Example results for my site are here
March 8th, 2008