Just a quick shout out about a site I have spent that last 2 weeks putting together. If you're a media center enthusiast, or hell, just love movies, you might be interested in checking out Meligrove.

To be honest, this is a small personal victory for me since I started this site with quite literally, next to zero programming experience. I have dabbled here and there, and while capable of designing front-end code (HTML, CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript) I have never attempted to build a completely dynamic site from scratch.

Some technical info for inquiring minds. Meligrove is written in Ruby (not Rails, I'm actually using eRuby so I can template Ruby inline with my HTML) and employs very little database. Since the content of this site is directly related to what files and content exist, the file system is me database. Plus it's faster and easier to maintain.

I am currently tying 2 remote API's together (well, only 1 API and then 1 XML feed), movie-xml.com and Rotten Tomatoes. Last.fm will be the music tie in that I do once I am ready to move onto the music pages. Overall, Ruby has been awesome to work with.

The end result has been completely satisfying. Meligrove is currently averaging over 1000 page views a day right now, so I would say the community likes it too. You should check it out if you get a chance.

I just posted the TextMate email bundle over at the Campaign Monitor blog. Check it out if you're a TextMate user and want to speed up testing templates.

For the past 3 weeks at work I've been busy making the 'most tested as humanly possible' html email templates. We finally launched them today so if you're interested I strongly encourage you to stop by and check them out.

Hopefully next week I'll have some time to post the TextMate bundle I made that turns email testing (that used to be a chore) into a pretty painless testing experience.

A very long time ago, before there was Google Analytics or Mint, there was this incredibly sexy and useful web app called Reinvigorate. Reinvigorate did some crazy good analytics. It was pretty, useful and most amazing of all, free. This was still back in the day before Urchin was bought out by Google and people still dished out thousands for enterprise analytic tools and Omniture. Well, ok that last one still hasn't changed.

Then one day out of the blue, Reinvigorate disappeared due to some type of webhost mishap. A site appeared with an elusive message saying they'd be back one day. Almost 2 years passed before a private beta appeared and shortly thereafter Reinvigorate was reborn.

I probably should have posted something about Reinvigorate last year but I didn't start using it again until just a few weeks ago. What I like best about Reinvigorate is the 'quick glance' I can get by logging in checking out my sites. Unlike Google Analytics, Reinvigorate updates in real time.

There is another cool feature they recently launched called Snoop. Snoop is a local application you can install that gives you a real time view of the visitors on your website. You can trigger events by attaching different keys on certain pages (like a checkout page or other conversion) for example. While I don't run any websites that have any kind of conversion like this, I can certainly see how it would be useful.

I am not completely sure why more people don't use Reinvigorate. It's an awesome tool and could easily replace Mint for my instant stat joneses. Google Analytics might have some extra detail with some of its reporting but the whole wait a day to see yesterdays traffic drives me nuts.

This one's short and sweet. If you're a Mac user and think that the green checkmark and blue sync badges are teh fugly, here's 2 icons to replace them. These look significantly better in my opinion and keeps Finder looking much cleaner.

Just ctrl-click (right click) the Dropbox application and click "Show Package Contents". Then go into "Contents", then "Resources". Drag the 2 .icns files from this zip into the Resources folder replacing the 2 originals.

You will have to quit and restart Dropbox as well as most likely restart Finder (relaunch by force quitting, or log out and back in.)

Before:

After:

Credit goes out to David Lanham and the Agua Extras icon set since all I did was resize and re-package.

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