Observu is free service which informs you if one of your sites is down. Simple register all your websites with them and receive an email notification if one of them is dead. Nice!
What's new in Rails 2.1?
If you want to know what’s new in Rails 2.1 or think that you may have missed a new feature, you should check out the e-book “Ruby on Rails 2.1. What’s new?“.
There are all new features described with an example. It’s quite amazing to see how rails evolves.
btw: did you know that there is finally an i18n patch in edge rails, to be released with rails 2.2? this is a solid foundation for other plugins to build on.
Cool way of creating arrays in ASP (VBScript) – advanced
It’s a small function which I will introduce today but very useful. When working recently on ajaxed i discovered that its often possible to pass an array or a primitive type as an argument to a function. Lets say you have a function println(msg) which prints out its argument as a line to the screen. When the argument is an array then it treats each field as a line. So it should be possible to call the function with those variations:
println("something")
println(array("some", "more", "lines"))
Lets see how we solve the solution in a nice way and how we will be able to create a function which is simply called [] (which is common syntax for an array in other languages).
Methods for hiding/obfuscating emails in your website
Hiding your emails on your website can be very tricky and the method should be chosen wisely. Yeah, its our war against email harvesters! Just now i have read the outcome of an interesting study made by Silvan Mühlemann. In his research he used nine different methods to obfuscate the email on his page. He created an email address for each method and was keeping track of the incoming spam for 1.5! years. Here is the outcome:
(source: Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared)
Amazing! The simplest methods using CSS had the best results. No Spam at all. There is just one question: How long will it take for the harvesters to adapt their algorithms to this research results?
(If you’re interested to see the detailed implementation of those methods just check the original article. I have skipped it.)
Free book about the secrets of code review
SmartBear Software released a book called “Best kept secrets of Peer code review”. Title sound interesting and its even free. I have just ordered my copy today (unfortunately there are shipping costs involved outside US) and looking forward to the secrets 
Grab yours guys.
(Btw: this is my first post using an external tool for blogging – BlogDesk. Works perfect!)