tech tools

Rails webdevelopment blog has a great tutorial that explains how to use the new Effect.Queues in the popular script.aculo.us JavaScript library. Effect queues allows you to queue up multiple effects on a DOM node or group of DOM nodes. This is one of the most handy JavaScript scripts out there and if you haven’t tried it you definitely should check it out.

After reading this tutorial it should be pretty clear to you the value of it as well as the methods that you employ to make use of it. I’m trying to feature more Rails related posts here on Digital Media Minute just because of the amount of interest that people are showing the comments.

United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations maintains a huge list of city names for every country in the world with lots of other meta data like geographic coordinates, names without diacritics, subdivision (province, state, etc). You can simply view the data using their search options, or even better download the data in CSV or MS Access format!  It’s not like you’ll need information like this every single day but potentially at some point in the future you’ll create an e-commerce site or just need to populate a database with more cities and information related to them than you’d ever be able to construct otherwise.