Twitter - the lifestreaming-meets-microblogging social site - has exploded in the last year and lots of applications have been developed that can take advantage of Twitter accounts. The downside is that many have required users to put their own Twitter username and password credentials into the third party apps.. a security minefield!

Sau Sheong Chang works at Yahoo!'s Singapore office. Yahoo! isn't implemented in Ruby, of course, but Sau's made an attempt at implementing a basic search engine in Ruby and has written a pretty interesting, indepth article about the whole process. Sau's search engine is formed of a crawler, indexer, and query system, and uses Hpricot, DataMapper, and Sinatra to get things done. Lots of code, lots of explanations - go read it.

There's plenty of stuff in Ruby that I've either not noticed before, noticed but forgotten about, or otherwise failed to realize the utility of. Add to that all the awesome Ruby tricks and techniques I'm seeing in people's code over on Github lately and.. we need a new series here: Ruby Techniques Revealed!

If you're a Ruby developer, the current recession needn't be too hard.. depending on where you live, of course. There are some good jobs going out there and if you're on the hunt for one, we've recently had several Rails-focused positions come by our Ruby jobs board in both the US and UK:

Twibot is a Sinatra-esque "micro framework" for building Twitter bots (somewhat like Isaac is for IRC).

Disclaimer: Every time we've run a piece about benchmarking or performance numbers on Ruby Inside, a retraction or significant correction has come out shortly thereafter. Benchmarking is hard, ugly, and quite often wrong or biased. It is not useless, however, but if you depend on the results in any way, you should certainly try to do your own benchmarking to confirm.

Try this:

2008's RubyFringe conference, put on by Canadian Rails consultancy Unspace, was heralded as a landmark in Ruby conferences and set a benchmark that has only recently been approached by the fervor around events like Ruby Manor. After the event, Unspace rapidly said that there wouldn't be another RubyFringe, but...

Blogo is a Mac / OS X blogging client developed by Brainjuice - the business name of Benjamin Jackson and Ivan Neto, Rio based Ruby developers and Web designers - and born out of their frustration with existing commercial blog editors.

Vidar Hokstad is the writer behind the fine Writing a Compiler in Ruby series, but he's taken a break to explain the structure and semantics of the Ruby object model. It's a fine walkthrough.