Life is grand

Corank made me giddy an hour or so ago. It is Digg but I get to pick the 14 year olds I associate with. Digg filtered through a contacts network.

Then the reality started to seep in and the giddiness turned to sadness. Corank is close but my cigar remains unlit, the fat lady is still in her chamber. The first problem is that when you bookmark something the tag field is limited to a few characters. I enter a lot of tags when I bookmark a URL, it helps me find things later. I can’t work as expected with Corank.

The other problem is the filtering is all or nothing. Only items bookmarked by people I specifically add as sources make it onto my front-page. I’d prefer if Corank had a Digg-like front-page and that the “sources” I subscribe to only influence the front-page. That way I can keep a finger on the pulse of the internet but make sure that people I think are smart get to influence that pulse. They must not define the pulse. As Corank stands I’d have to add 50 million people to my list making sure I exclude the 14 year olds. At the least Corank should flip it around.

I wasn’t sure this was going to work but fantastically it does. Maybe I am ignorant but I think this is pretty handy.

You are working on a local Ruby on Rails app and you have your local webrick server running. Now you want to show your team mate your local copy but on their machine and in their browser.

Normally you run Webrick with ruby script/server and that fires up a server on http://127.0.0.1:3000/.

But to share it with your mate that won’t work (127.0.0.1 is localhost and peculiar to your machine.) Instead you can simply run Webrick like so; ruby script/server -b machinename (where machinename is your computer’s network name.) That will then make your Rails app available to your team mate on http://machinename:3000/. You can put in an IP address instead of a name if you want.

Handy.