Notes and articles I wrote between 2010 and 2012 while building web products, including Bitesize Irish Gaelic. They are kept here as originally written, so some links and tools mentioned may be out of date.
- Old tricks to encourage user involvement (10 February 2010) – What I learned about reputation, feedback and game mechanics while trying to get people contributing to a collaborative Irish dictionary.
- tmux for noobs: Multiple windows and panes in your terminal (9 January 2012) – A beginner's walkthrough of tmux: splitting panes, creating windows and the key bindings you need first.
- Aargh. 2Checkout.com’s instant notification system is a mess. (7 October 2010) – Inconsistencies and a missing-data bug in 2Checkout's recurring-payment notifications, found while building a subscription billing system.
- An unexpected benefit of mailing lists (14 November 2010) – Why replying personally to email subscribers turned out to be the best source of feedback for a new web product.
- Learnings from having Mailchimp ask me to kindly leave. (20 March 2011) – What happened when a 3,000-subscriber list was shut down over spam complaints, and what I'd do differently.
- In favour of a single-forum forum (8 October 2010) – The case for a forum with no sub-forums, based on running Irish-language community sites.
- Syncing SSH config (18 December 2011) – Keeping one SSH config in sync across several machines.
- Create a custom search engine for Firefox, IE, Chrome (26 January 2010) – Step-by-step: add your site's search to the browser using OpenSearch.