holman's Comments

Quite well. The migration was painless, and the site certainly feels snappier.

Yeah; I'll have to give some thought to any possible upgrades. Previously I'd have to do some rather ugly hacks if I were to bump up; now it's relatively easier. The trick, of course, is to offer some decent hooks for authors to resubmit their tutorials using larger thumbnails. But that can be handled well enough. And I'm saving all pre-resized uploads now, so if you're submitting new tutorials today I can recrop down the line from your original upload to the new format.

How's 900x750 work as a thumbnail for you guys? There'd be SO MUCH RESOLUTION LOL LOL.

Ran into a couple unexpected snags post-deploy, but they were easy fixes. :) Server's happily churning away on all the icons now.

Good-Tutorials is English-only.

Featured Tutorials are paid ads; those that get featured are self-selected by those purchasing the spot.

Throwing an error for me.

This doesn't seem to render more than the header for me in Safari 4.

Good assortment of tips.

Serializing is cool in a lot of cases, but I'd definitely give it a good thought of the implications. You're pulling a lot of database functionality when you go the serialization route. Take user preferences, for example: if you're serializing an array of four user preferences, it becomes much harder to aggregate that data and making a quick query to see which user preference is in use the most is much harder to compute.

Marshaling objects back and forth is not one of Ruby's strong points, either, though for most applications it's probably not a serious concern. Now, if you're dealing with some complex hierarchical objects, serialization can be a pretty wicked-clever way to tuck that away and only pull it up when you need it, so YMMV.

The general ideas here are decent, though meta tags haven't really been used in a decade (with the exception of the description tag, which is sometimes pulled in engines), and I'd be really careful about the h1 CSS positioning hack. Any time you end up reworking output differently than what's there visually, you can run the risk of catching the ire of various search engines.

Ironically enough, the site's down.

Thanks, everyone; I'm currently going through the stack of applications... you'll be hearing from me soon. As always, if any of you are interested, feel free to post a message to the link above and I'll review your application as well. :)