Google announced this week that they will be launching a new service soon called "Knol" (meaning a unit of knowledge). It's designed to be a source of knowledge similar to Wikipedia. Their aim is to allow experts to write authoritative articles covering their areas of expertise. Sounds a lot like Wikipedia, right? Well, with Knol, Google will allow authors to have profiles so the user can know exactly who wrote what. In addition to the accountability of the sources, Knol will also allow authors to place ads on their created pages, giving them a portion of the revenue generated from the ad clicks.

You can read more about it on Google's official blog.

Thanks to Microsoft, it's been impossible in the past to install two different versions of Internet Explorer in Windows. Whenever a new one is installed, the older version is deleted. Good for end-users, but bad for us. We need the ability to test our sites on multiple browsers to ensure uniformity. Because of the IE multiple install problem, we have to maintain a separate test computer just to be able to access IE 6 for testing.

Our own black sheep Shawn came through with a resource he stumbled across that would solve this problem. The MultipleIE installer takes advantage of a DLL exploit in Windows (imagine that!) to allow installation of IE 3, 4.01, 5, 5.5, and 6! Not bad!

Several times a week a few of Plexus' underpaid staff go out to lunch at various locations around Athens. We've been doing this for quite some time, and have compiled quite a list of regular destinations. Recently, with the help of the EATS Tour, we decided to broaden our horizons and try some of more choice locations of Athens's underbelly.

The BARFS Tour was born. BARFS, or the Bar and Restaurant Food Society, was created by founding members Colin Jones, Adam Parrott, Travis Roberts, and Buck Sharp. We plan to spend the next few months sampling the not-so-finer things in life.

So, if you're interested in finding out what a few Athenians think are C list restaurants and reading what we think about each dining experience, check out the BARFS Tour Blog. For all the restaurants we visit, we will dine then post our reviews of food, atmosphere, service and price of the restaurant.

We regularly check our Google Analytics account to follow what kind of traffic we have on this site. It's sometimes very interesting to see what search terms people are using on Google or Yahoo! to reach our site. Natalie and Stephanie, while in a client meeting, noticed that one of the search terms we've been getting traffic from recently is 'private video.' Hmmmmmmm. Interesting.

Buck and I looked into it further, and it turns out that the terms are coming from one of his blog posts describing how to embed YouTube videos in a Web site without having to share them as public on the YouTube site. When we did a Google search for 'private video,' his blog post came up around #17. But when we did a search for 'embed private video,' his blog post was #1. . . above the YouTube article on how to embed a private video! Crazy!

When using Ruby on Rails, ERb (embedded Ruby) is used a LOT in the X/HTML. There are two types of ERb,

An evaluation block:

And an output block:

These blocks are necessary when using Rails, and I've noticed that when I do a 'View Source' (via the Web Developer addon for Firefox, of course), I see a lot of funky spacing and line breaking where the ERb's have been evaluated. Probably fine for most people, but it makes reading the outputted HTML code a hassle.

It turns out that there are really three ways to use the evaluation ERb that can affect your spacing and line-breaking.

Firstly, the output block is used just like you'd expect to use it. If your code says this:

The resulting HTML will look just like this:

Evaluation block use #1: If you just put a block, it will cause a line break after the block in the HTML, so if you had this in your code:

The resulting HTML code would look like this:

Evaluation block use #2: If you add a dash(-) at the end of the block, it will prevent it from adding a line break. So, if your code looks like this:

The resulting HTML code would look like this:

The line break is gone, but the space taken by the block is still there. That leads us to. . .

Evaluation block use #3: If you add a dash(-) at the beginning AND end of the block, it will prevent it from adding a line break AND remove the leading space it would have taken up. So, if your code looks like this:

The resulting HTML code would look like this:

You'd never know there was a code block there! Is this useful? I don't know... maybe.