I’ve always been a Prototype advocate. Not for any deep down reason for how it compares with jQuery though, mostly because I was interested in learning Ruby on Rails and it happend to be the library of choice. With version 1.0 of jQuery hitting the shelves over the weekend, it’s a good time to reevluate the reasoning behind this. Luckily there’s great posts out there advocating both for prototype and Why jQuery’s Philosophy is Better. Interesting food for thought. Look forward to reading over jQuery 1.0’s source.

I have to admit, I’ve always been a little weary of using Wordpress. Not because it’s not a great piece of software, but because I had less motive to get under the hood with it than with something like Typo or BlogCFC. I’m going to admin defeat for the moment though, and say that having something up and running (and stable) is probably the best bet any way you look at it. As far as installation goes, Dreamhost provided everything at a quick point click installation from their web panel. Although their panel is a little on the slow side, and not the most feature rich, I don’t seem to miss the ones they don’t provide. With that I set up this blog, as well as a fun one to work on — Florida Idiots at FlorIdiots.us, a domain I’d been long wanting to do something with. Both installations were painless, and I’ve been slowly ramping up the plugin that have been interesting so far. I’m sure I’ll be posting which ones I’m using as soon as things quiet down.

BackPackIt by 37 Signals has gotten a lot of press lately. Besides being one of the two most highly publicized applications by them, BackPack is built with Ruby on Rails.

It was about time for me to learn what all the fuss was about. I have a number of projects and lists in my head aching for an out, and with Googles Todo list addon for their Calendar not yet released (only hinted at in the code), thought I’d give something else a try. I’d used Tada List for the extremely simple lists on the side only to be impressed by the user interface.

BackPack is quite an impressive ap. Filling the application with small elements that update independently of each other makes for a much quicker user experience, cutting page requests down to a minimum. The list ui is about the same as TadaList, without a few of the bells. The way a lot of the features are worked into the interface is innovative. For instance, the Edit and Delete options on any list, list item or note aren’t easily visible as they are on most tools. Instead, they only show the links to those items when moused over — keeping the GUI clean. Adding new lists, list items, notes, pictures and everything else on “page” is all contained to a single page load. The concept of a Page is to organize information. This might be an event, a project, a list of projects, as well as many other options. I can’t say i’ve checked out the files, images or writeboard sections.

A few issues did come up though. When you create a new list on a new page the list doesn’t automatically have a title. This makes adding multiple lists awkward at first. It makes sense to not have a name when you only have one list. The only other awkward part was that when I added a new link to a page it did not show up on the public version. It took recreating it a few times and disabling the sharing to finally get it to show up. Now, that option may have just been cached, but it did take some time. Overall it’s an amazing ap that gave me a few good ideas on interface design.

Oh yeah, here’s my public page. Not too much there so far, but I’m getting there.