So Digg v.3 officially launched this week. Hmm… I’ve got to admit I was expecting a bit more for this being the big 3.0 update. As predicted, the content covered on one of the internet’s favorite social news sites has been expanded to include news about not just technology, but also topics as diverse as science, business, and entertainment.

And while there are also a generous amount of well thought out refinements such a streamlined layout, easier login, and better sorting of stories, somehow I feel like Digg 3.0 is lacking… umph?

Now I’ll fully accept that I’m just being dense and haven’t found a way to do this, but shouldn’t we have the ability to setup custom story lists that we can filter as we desire: say, a list that covers only content about the Xbox 360 and the Wii. That’s the kind of precision guided content I thought was coming down the line, but regretfully all I can find are high level sorting options like “gaming news” and “programming”.

Being able to filter stories by a more specific topic is certainly helpful, yes, but that’s the type of functionality I’d like to afford the user, rather than setting up concrete options that don’t change. Still, the websmiths at 37 Signals do advocate releasing small feature upgrades often, so maybe Digg is onto something?

Regardless of the update feeling a little light, Digg 3.0 is a very well thought out upgrade that creates palpable benefits for the user: give it a look!

Developers have grown increasingly more interested in Ruby on Rails over the last year, and for good reason: the Rails movement has ushered in a new paradigm of agile web development that has allowed dozens of web 2.0 applications to launch in highly condensed time frames.

I’ve been wondering lately though: how realistic is the long term use of Rails going to be? For a development environment to be so tied to a relatively young server package as lighttpd compared to the de-facto standard of Apache is slightly concerning. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like Rails has kicked the web movement into high gear, and I’m incredibly impressed with what I’ve seen. Lately though, I’ve been reading more and more about PHP frameworks that aim to either port, or at least mimic the essential Rails functionality, and it’s quite intriguing.

My main point of contention is that PHP is first and foremost intended for use on the web: it’s a “Hypertext Preprocessor”, where Ruby is a more multipurpose programming language. Does that mean PHP will have strengths in the web arena that Ruby cannot match? Or does that mean that Ruby will be more versatile because it doesn’t focus on HTML?

I’m by no means an expert, but this is one of the big topics on my mind right now. If you’d like to do some further reading, here are a couple overviews of PHP framework packages:

10 Different PHP Frameworks | Rails-inspired PHP frameworks