Though a cool artifact, it seems like the essence of something like this comes from interaction with the others using the service.
There's a really interesting podcast segment[1] about the Preserving Digital Worlds[2] project which tries to answer some of the questions about how to best document / preserve something who's value comes from the experiences users share with each other
99% Invisible should turn up on HN more often. It's a very interesting and very well produced podcast that should interest a lot of people here. The episodes are short and it's worth digging through the archives.
This is great. Outrage over government surveillance seems to be fading among the "mainstream", but this seems like just the thing that is accessible enough to get the general public on board.
What's the best way we can contribute if we can't be there in person for the rally?
Luckily, it looks like public opinion is actually shifting in our direction; the latest AP poll found that "close to 60 percent of Americans oppose the NSA's collection of data on telephone and Internet usage. A similar majority opposes the legal process supervised by a secret federal court that oversees the government's classified surveillance."
In terms of contributing/participating, there are a couple main ways:
1. Next week we're going to launch an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for buses to help people get to the rally, as well as things like permits and sound equipment.
2. We'll need help promoting the event, coordinating transportation for people, and calling people who've RSVP'd to make sure they've found a way to get to DC and a place to stay. If you RSVP on the website, you'll get more information on when/how to help with these efforts.
3. We're going to be organizing an online component to the rally for those who can't make it. Watching parties with high-quality livestreaming is a given (assuming we raise enough money), but we're very interested in exploring what the future of online-offline political action looks like. Any ideas? What would you like to see/do?
"When I write a Cucumber feature, I have to write the Gherkin that describes the acceptance criteria, and the Ruby code that implements the step definitions."
As someone who recently started using cucumber, this was definitely a frustration at first. But after a couple weeks of writing step definitions, and focusing on making them reusable (using some of the tips here: http://coryschires.com/ten-tips-for-writing-better-cucumber-... ), I ended up with a pretty good bank of general steps that I could cobble together into new features without much modification. The result was something much more readable and reusable than if I wasn't using Gherkin on top of the step definitions.
Be very careful of over reuse of step definitions, and of Transforms. You'll end up with code that's very difficult to understand as your step codebase grows.
I now tend towards minimal step re-use, lots of one or two-line steps calling into nice clean plain ruby classes which actually do the work of my steps.
Exec isn't the best designed website I've ever seen, but it's functional and presentable. There are plenty of startups / small companies that can't afford the money required for a senior level designer but would be happy to hire someone who could do even "design-school-freshman-quality stuff" for a reasonable price if it allowed them to present their idea / business in a way they couldn't on their own.
So if the measure of being a "professional designer" is someone who is paid to do design work, I think this is fine advice. A designer gets better with practice and real world work. This seems like a good starting point.
For anyone using PhantomJS I'd recommend checking out CasperJS (http://casperjs.org/) . It adds some nice features to PhantomJS and takes out a lot of the pain points
I'd give nzb.su a try. I started using them a few weeks ago as an auxiliary when I was having issues with nzbmatrix.
In my short few weeks of using it, the API seems better than nzbmatrix, but the community / comments on files is near nonexistent. If you're only looking for something to hook up to sickbeard / couchpotato though, it should do the job just fine.
There's a really interesting podcast segment[1] about the Preserving Digital Worlds[2] project which tries to answer some of the questions about how to best document / preserve something who's value comes from the experiences users share with each other
[1]https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/99-invisible-13x-game-over [2]http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/