Double Shot #514

The 1.0 release of Rails Freelancing Handbook is out. Head over to the site to pick up your copy if you're registered, or to find out how to buy one if you haven't already.

• distance_of_time_in_words - This version by Ryan Bigg removes the vagueness in the Rails core version.


• Mercurial: The Definitive Guide - Online book covering another of the popular DVCS software packages.


• Observational: Better Observers for ActiveRecord - This looks like an interesting way to improve the observer pattern support in Rails.


• RailsBridge Badges - Now you can publicly show your support for inclusiveness and friendliness in the Rails community.


• save! > save - Pratik Naik has more to say about good and bad Rails usage.


• Embracing REST with mind, body and soul - Jose Valim writes about some of the changes coming in Rails 3.


• TwitterLand - All the best Twitter-related APIs in one gem! - Easy interaction with Follow Cost, Twitter Grader, Mr. Tweet, Twinfluence, and Twitter Counter.


• Ice T presents Mac Repair - Personally, I thought this was hilarious, but if you're an Apple fanboy you should probably give it a pass.


• Introducing Shippinglogic - Ruby library for easy integration with FedEx, UPS, USPS and so on.


• Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 now available for download - I've been using the pre-alpha builds for a bit. I'm finding it fast but somewhat unstable.


• Ruby has a new Whois library - and now it's in pure Ruby.


• Superfeedr - "Real-time feed parsing in the cloud for web-developers." Designed to save you from building your own feed fetching and parsing infrastructure.