Ryan's Scraps

I gave a short and not-very-well-prepared demo of rela.tv at the Raleigh Ruby Brigade last night that generated a few inklings of interest amongst the crowd. And I use the word “interest” generously. However, I’ve been meaning to open-source the app for awhile now since I rarely find the time to play with it anymore – if for nothing else than to see if somebody else wants to use it as a learning tools as I did and try to further its functionality.

This comes with the disclaimer that I am not proud at all of the state of the code, and especially the state of the tests. Look at this as more of an opportunity for improvement than for a model by which all others should be based.

So, if you’ve got some interest in hacking away at a cool little Rails project – let me know. I’d love to see this get taken forward a few steps…

Rela.tv source access

https://saucyworks.devguard.com/svn/projects/rela.tv/trunk

Don’t know what rela.tv is? Check out the overview for a summary.

tags: rela.tv, xfn, rails, rubyonrails

For those times when I have to do a fresh install of Firefox, here are the extensions I can’t do without:

• SessionSaver: Saves your open tabs when you close firefox so they’re there when you re-open
• Adblock: Let’s you specify URLs to block using wildcard expressions
• Tabbrowser Preferences: Better tab preferences without going overboard
• Tab X: Gives you a close “x” button on each tab (in case Ctrl-W isn’t to your liking)
• Mouse Gestures: Great way to define shortcut actions using your mouse
• Resizeable Textarea: Let’s you resize text areas – for those times when your web based mail doesn’t quite give you enough room
• Sage: Unobtrusive RSS reader

And you can’t forget these performance tips: http://macosxcocktail.blogs.com/cocktail/2005/01/improve_firefox.html

Amazon.com is quietly building an impressive stable of web services to handle every bit of your computing infrastructure. Yeah, that’s right, these aren’t tiny little consumer-oriented web services to get product information (though those exist as well). These are services to manage file storage, messaging and now computing.

Amazon’s EC2 – Elastic Cloud Service provides an on-demand computing infrastructure, accessible via an API as well as a set of command line tools. With the use of their Amazon Machine Images (AMI) you can define a set of applications and libraries that you want to make available (think of these as virtual machine images) and can start them up as needed. Amazon has a standard set of Linux-based images with MySQL, Apache etc… And to top it off you can use the S3 storage service to persist your data (subject to normal S3 fees – though the bandwidth between EC2 and S3 is free).

Pricing for EC2 is competitive, as usual – you can get the equivalent of a machine with 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s bandwidth for $72/month. Yeah, wow.

Jesse has a nice writeup about the service and you can check out these docs to learn more as well:

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon EC2 API Reference
• Amazon EC2 Command Line Tools

Think of the possibilities – an on-demand fleet of dedicated, preconfigured Rails servers with infinite storage…

All that’s left now is for Amazon to develop a relational storage service, perhaps built on top of S3 that can provide a standard SQL interface to your data. Then you will have the complete stack of services necessary to build most any application.

tags: aws, amazon web services, amazon elastic cloud, amazon ec2

My RailsDay creation, gr.egario.us just got a little update. You can now set yourself up to be notified when a quote is commented on or voted on.

Right under the vote tally for a quote is the link you can use to be notified when somebody votes on that quote (when registered of course):

And right at the top of every quote’s comment thread is the same link for comment notifications:

If email notifications aren’t your thing, every listing page has it’s own rss feed – like the new quotes feed, the popular feed etc… so you can stay on top of the type of stuff that tickles your fancy.

Also new in this update is the ability to search for a quote. It currently searches on the quote body, context and who said it (no tag-based search yet). The nifty search box is brought to you by the wonder of scriptaculous’s auto-completing text fields and nice integration with Rails’ text_field_with_auto_complete javascript helper.

I’d love to hear what you think of the concept and what suggestions you have – so if you’re the opinionated type lemme have it!

tags: railsday, scriptaculous, gr.egario.us

I’ve got 4 more GMail invites for my Java kindred. Let me know if you want one (and list your email address for me).

It was pretty clear after my last post that there are some good options when it comes to Rails hosting (and there are some having a few issues – hopefully all temporary). So after checking it all out, I’m going to start out with Planet Argon, which makes me an argonaut, er planetonian, er planaliscious argoharrian? Anyway, if you can get past their very 1995-ish sign-up process (snail mail or fax the hosting agreement and no way to enter a credit card into a web form), it’s all good. Great personal service and you can always find help on their IRC channel. Their startup documentation is still very much a work in progress (i.e. I can’t find any) which forces you to be somewhat intelligent and figure stuff out on your own. But when Robby (the techie-owner) is always a stone’s throw away on IRC, that’s not an issue. Thanks to all those who commented on the original post, it turned out to be quite an active discussion.

If you sign up yourself and want to throw me a bone, put me down as your referrer. It will make me happy, which makes me happy.

I’ve been waiting for the fictitious Rails App Hosting to get off the ground for awhile now and have come to the realization that, in the name of expediency, I may need to look at some other options. Gauging by the amount of chatter and the “I just think your website looks legit” factor it certainly seems that Textdrive is the big daddy in town while Planet Argon is the smaller but still quite active player in the Rails hosting space.

So the question becomes, does anybody have any strong opinions between the two services, or even more ideally, has anybody hosted on both and can give their overall opinion? My main priorities are ease of setup and configuration, tech support and scaleability…

The buzz around the net today will no doubt be the release of the long-awaited and much talked about google calendar. I’ve signed up and it is pretty slick – combining a lot of the nice features of 30 Boxes, Calendar Hub and Kiko in the to-be-expected simple, usable and very web 2.0 interface. However, I have one gripe with Google Calendar (and the rest of the crowd)....

Why don’t you support tasks!!!

Tasks are part of iCal, and are an integral part of most people’s use of a calendar, yet nobody supports them. Come on people, get with the program and do it right!

And so ends my rant.

I’ve been tinkering away on a little side project called rela.tv for quite awhile now. The basic concept is that it will let you visualize and organize your relationships.

“Relationships” is a loaded term, but in this case it means any relationship that can be defined in the terms of a hyperlink. With the foundation of the XFN class of relationships this can be any one of a number of pre-defined personal relationships. But rela.tv goes one step further and lets you define your own types of relationships.

It’s like tagging your links with real-world relational values.

No more explanation. Check it out and keep in mind it’s still very raw and is likely to look like poop on anything but Firefox… Hit me with any feedback you have!

tags: xfn, rela.tv

I just ran across an almost exact functional clone of my RailsDay entrant, Gr.egario.us over at Quotiki. I’d say the design is much better than what I was able to do, although they don’t yet have the ability to put quotes on your own site like gr.egario.us offers.

Is that the sound of bitterness you hear? Not at all – in fact I’d love to pull gr.egario.us down at some point so please take a look at Quotiki for your future needs. My only question is – was Quotiki written in a day?

If any of the Quotiki folks want to look at how easy it is to write in Rails, let me know and I can shoot the source over to you. The only thing more satisfying than a Java-to-Rails conversion is a .NET-to-Rails conversion.

tags: rubyonrails, rails, railsday2006, quotiki

Reading about CDBaby’s impending conversion to Rails jogged my memory of something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, make a CDBaby Firefox search extension. So, here it is:

My CDBaby Firefox search engine extension

Whenever I hear about new music I want to try I always do a search on CDBaby.com first, then go onto more commercial ways of acquiring the music if CDBaby doesn’t have it. Hopefully this will make that process one step cleaner.

Let me know if you have comments, problems or feedback.

The thrill is gone with this whole invite thing, but I realize there are a few more of you out there who don’t have yours yet. Let me know if you want one, the first 4 will be accepted… (and leave your email address)

All you 37 Signals fan-boys can have your tada list – the truth of the matter is that Remember the Milk has it beat in every possible way. Simplicity doesn’t mean the dearth of features – it means presenting essential features in a concise and intuitive manner. Tada list simply removes features. No due dates, no priorities? – that’s not of much use to me.

tags: tadalist, rememberthemilk, todos

Thanks to the Google ads I have on my site, I recently came across a pretty damn good deal for a dedicated server. Right now I’m running all my mail and web sites on a virtual private server from Linode.com and have no complaints at all. However, I’m paying $40/month for 4GB and 128 MB of dedicated resources – pretty steep.

The add I saw was for ServerPronto.com for a $30/month deal for a wholely dedicated server with a 40GB HDD and 256 MB. Of course I signed up for it just to give it a try and have been please so far. Good bandwidth although it doesn’t have the management console that Linode.com does.

I’m thinking about running all my Java stuff on the dedicated server since it has more memory and just running my mail on the Linode. Seems like a fair compromise for somebody that doesn’t really need two servers out there anyways.

And I thought the Google ads were supposed to make me money, not entice me into buying more stuf…

With the trunk version of Typo you may or may not have noticed that your Technorati (or blo.gs etc…) pings aren’t getting recognized. This is because Typo doesn’t currently send the ping in the proper format. However, I just submitted this patch to the folks at typo that should remedy things.

When you add a new entry to your blog, most blogging software supports the weblogUpdates.ping ping specification that will notify blog aggregators and other services that your blog has been updated. This is done through a pretty simple SOAP call that just tells the service the blog that was updated and the root URL of the blog.

Typo seemed to support this functionality through its “settings -> General Settings -> URLs to ping automatically” section. However it was sending a POST request with a format that wasn’t quite the weblogUpdates.ping format. (Not to mention that it wasn’t a SOAP request). I noticed this and submitted this issue to the Typo guys. After sitting back and basking in my find for a day or two it dawned on me that I had every ability to fix the issue. So after toiling a bit and making a few passes, I did just that and submitted the above mentioned patch.

So why do I mention this? Because I’m egotistical and self-centered? Well, yes. But also because this announcement by scott made me a bit nervous that it might be awhile until the patch made it into the trunk and I thought a few people might want to get their posts recognized sooner by the very important ecosystem of blog aggregators and services. No knock on the Typo guys at all, just an opportunity to get the functionality in place sooner rather than later.

If you’re not up to doing the whole patch application process yourself, you can download these three files into your current Typo installation. (Make sure you’re on the most recent revision, though – 760 as of this writing)

app/models/ping.rb
app/controllers/application.rb
app/controllers/admin/content_controller.rb

Also let me know if you see a better way of doing things as I’m no Rails pro.