It’s time to summarize what we have done for the Open Source community. Scribd is pretty open company, we release a lot of code into the public after a time (sometimes it is short, sometimes it is not). Here I want to mention all the code we have opensourced. Please take into account that time is moving on, so we are publishing more and more code. I will update this post periodically, so stay tuned. Follow me on Twitter to get instant updates.
There was a lot of articles about HTML5 last days, so when Alexey Kovyrin asked me to help him with his new blog design I saw no other choice but using HTML5. There are a lot of new features added since HTML4, and some of them could be used today, like new elements <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, etc. I think this is a nice addition to the HTML, because these elements add more sense to an unstructured markup. There is a buzzword “semantic” exists to describe this, but I don’t like buzzwords, so I would call it “sense”. So what features we could get from HTML5, that are supported by all modern browsers?
In Scribd we have tons of analytics data generated daily that should be somehow processed. Currently we use MySQL to store all this stuff, but that is not the best option for logging lots of data. So we’ve decided to try some more specialized tools, which could help us to store and process our data. The most interesting thing which could simplify analytics data collecting was Scribe. As it turned out, installation process is not so simple as expected so here you will find a few steps manual on how to install Scribe on a developer machine.
Here in Scribd we are using Git as primary version control system. We have tons of branches created, merged and destroyed every day. Someday I hope to describe our workflow with Git, but today I want to write about some useful techniques of working with this incredible tool.
It’s implied that you know what is Git itself and how to work with it. Below you can find some advanced tricks, that should be helpful for you (at least they were helpful for me).
In my previous post I’ve described how to display RSS-feed in browser using XSLT. But sometimes It’s necessary to change order of items in feed, for example sort them by date. XSLT 1.1 allows sorting by complex data types, but XSLT 1.0 does not and we need extract separate date parts.
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