I’m always drawn to reviews of the best places to live (probably because I know where I currently live is not on my top 100). Money recently published a top 100 list, but unlike any previous list I’ve seen before, Money took the time to map them on a Google map. Nice use of technology. I’d much prefer to see the list that way, than to scroll through the list of 100 to see which ones I want to read about. There are some parts of the country I’m less likely to visit or move to than others, so with the map I can look for my preferred areas.

See the map at Money’s web site.

Tripbase is a travel site with an interesting Ajax interface. The site is designed to help the user find travel destinations according to their preferences and interests. For the Ajax interface, sliders are first provided allowing the user to set the type of destination they are looking for, by weighing their preferences on Nightlife, Dining, Shopping, Nature, and Attractions. After that initial selection is done, a list of top suggestions is presented on the page, and further preference customizations are given, including the dates and duration you want to travel, where you are departing from, your preferred weather, your budget, the type of trip you are looking for, the continents you are interested in, and if you want to travel in a high or low tourist season.

As you adjust the preferences on the left, the suggestions update live on the right side of the screen. In this section, it shows one photo of the suggested destination, and shows the cost per day and the population, with a link for more information.

When you click for more information on any of the suggestions, a window appears over the results with the detail information. The detail window shows the temperature, tourist season and rainfall for the period of travel indicated; has photos, and links to articles; a list of things to do, dining, nightlife, lodging, shopping, nature, and then has links to search for flights or hotels (using a different web site).

The interface is easy to use and was very responsive on my laptop using Firefox 2.

Note: I haven’t touched on it much on my site, but I will in the coming weeks. I’ve become a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and have been doing a lot of coding in it during my spare time. It has brought back the fun I used to have developing Internet software from years ago.

Ruby Inside has posted an interview with the developer of Trawlr, Ben Smith. Some of my favorite highlights are:

Almost all the readers I looked at kept each feed separate and behaved like email where you had to keep marking items or feeds as read to prevent a huge, overwhelming backlog.

The way I use RSS is to subscribe to a large number of feeds (over 300) and then simply ‘dip in’ and read when I have time.

When I first discovered the REST features in Rails (via DHH’s “World of Resources” presentation) I didn’t really get it. Once I started to understand that REST is all about modeling ‘things’ and their relationships by creating rich associations it started to make sense.

The additional benefit of using the same code to respond according to the requesting user agent is a major bonus. Within trawlr I mainly use the REST features to keep the code DRY for different response types; rss and opml being two current examples. In the future I hope to add a mobile version.

Read the entire article at Ruby Inside.