I totally haven’t tested this on many browsers, but I’ve managed to get the Jquery Thickbox 3.1 to load up Simpleviewer in a modal window.  You can see it work by clicking gallery at the top of this page.

A series of discoveries have led me to question my initial decision to stick with PHP and a PHP-based web framework (Symfony is my favorite) for the web, rather than switching to the vaunted Ruby on Rails framework.  The first discovery was just a simple article on the origins of Ruby.  Here, I have to admit a personal bias and say that if you asked me to choose between something designed by a Japanese designer and an American one, I would select the Japanese.  9 times out of 10, the object, the artifact if you will, will be less complex and more beautiful.¹  And after working my way through this fantastic interactive tutorial, I really begin to get a feel for the simplicity of Ruby.  It’s actually aesthetically pretty—uncluttered and easy to parse (grammatically).  And the, finally, the kicker was this screencast tutorial of how to build a database driven blog in about fifteen minutes.  Woah.  So, I’m rolling up my sleeves and giving Ruby a try.  If I like it, I just might switch.

For those of you who subscribe to my personal feed, which is all my goings-on all over the web, I’m sure you noticed the enormous barrage of activity there tonight. Make no mistake, barrage is a wholly accurate word for what I intend to be a flanking manuever on Google against Congressman Russell Warner (and no I will not link to his site and add to his Pagerank). For some time now I have been waging a campaign to become the dominate Russell Warner on Google. I was it, for a while, thanks to my very early arrival on the web. But I got knocked off the hill, as they say—I got too big for my britches and took it all for granted. And the hell of it all was that I was again number 1 for about two weeks before Congressman Warner overtook my lead (from second, I think).

But now, between the rejiggering of my blogs, Friendfeed, Lijit, and Claimid, I intend to get it all back! Beware Russell Warners. I’m coming for you, and no corner of the web is safe.

I’m pretty excited that I’ve finished my first real Jquery UI widget.  You can see it running over on Banapana.  It’s basically just a graphic dropdown menu that shows all the categories for the blog, highlights each button and hides itself when a Jquery “mouse leave” event occurs.  By the way, that’s one thing that I just love about Jquery—the incredibly simple and somewhat intuitive syntax.  The fact that it works exactly like CSS selectors is a huge boon to someone who already knows CSS, and the names for events and such are almost so straight forward that you don’t even have to look them up.  You can see some more of my Jquery work over at my Jquery Sandbox.