Andy Milk Interactive

Blue Box Group

To put it simply, these guys are the best.

Here’s a few reasons why:

• They offer both Shared and Virtual hosting solutions for Rails
• Plans can start as cheap as $10/month.  This is a shared server but you have MANY Ruby gems at your disposal.
• Virtual plans start at $25/month and you can upgrade as the need arises (memory low, site lag, traffic increases, etc.)
• Their support is as easy as sending an email.  I usually get at least a “I’m looking into this now” email within 30 minutes.  I don’t have to use any sort of support ticket system.  They offer one (and the emails feed into it), but they don’t require it.
• These guys KNOW their Rails environments, deployment recipes, common bugs, and plugins.  There’s almost never a question they can’t answer, or at least point me in the right direction

I’m using them for several projects, both internal and client projects.  I’m recommending them to anyone who needs Rails hosting.

Here they are: http://www.blueboxgrp.com/

I love their tagline: “Where Ruby on Rails hosting isn’t a headache!”

I just started working on the “Find a Friend” portion of a social networking project, and I realized that I’ll need to filter users by their locations.  I’ve integrated geocoding on apps before and performed basic lookups of cities and states using Google & Yahoo’s APIs.  I’ve banged out the calculations needed to find zip codes within a certain radius of another zip code.  This is my first time integrating geocoding into a Rails application and, to my delight and lack of surprise, someone has already built a plug-in that handles geocoding.

It’s called Geokit and you can find it here:  http://geokit.rubyforge.org

It can do a lot.  All you need is to add “lat” and “lng” float columns to the table that you need geocoding on.  Install the gem & plug-in and it’s a SNAP after that.  You can find the distance between two points, you can auto-geocode a location on the creation of an object, you can find all the objects within a certain distance radius.  This last piece of functionality is what I needed.

So in about 90 minutes, I was able to find Geokit, install it, retrofit my tables with lat and lng, auto-geocode my objects on create, and implement a “Find a Friend” lookup.  Similiar to Facebook, I want users who search for other users to find nearby users first, before searching the whole database of users.  For the most part, it’s a sort by distance and then search term.

One of the slickest details of Geokit is its use of multiple geocoding sources.  Here it is straight from their project page:  Geocoding from multiple providers. It currently supports Google, Yahoo, Geocoder.us, Genames, and Geocoder.ca geocoders, and it provides a uniform response structure from all of them. It also provides a fail-over mechanism, in case your input fails to geocode in one service.

Nicely done.

Recently I’ve been concepting and building several Facebook applications for my clients.  Some of them are stand-alone, from scratch, and don’t have a companion web site.  Others are extensions of existing web sites or applications.  Instead of building an application from scratch, populating data, cultivating a user base, these extended Facebook apps already have a regular web application’s data and functionality to build on.  I’ll post a link to an app soon that I’m building for one of my clients that does just that.  It’s ALMOST ready for prime time.

Facebook unveiled the new layout in July and, much to the chagrin of many apps developers, some parts of their API changed, forcing app developers to update their apps.  It wasn’t THAT bad, though, and they gave everyone plenty of warning.

For the app that we’re about to launch, I needed to build it in ColdFusion and there doesn’t seem to be many resources out there for ColdFusion with Facebook.  I found Dominic Watson’s library, which seems to work with the old Facebook layout.  Then I found Gavin’s library.

BIG thanks to Gavin (http://cffacebook.wordpress.com/) for taking Dominic’s library and bringing it up to speed with the New Facebook.  It was the first library that I was able to get setFBML working successfully.  It’s one of the most valuable tools in a Facebook application:  the ability to post content on the logged-in user’s profile.

Check out the app that Gavin created using ColdFusion and his own library:  http://apps.facebook.com/humorous/

I just wanted to give a shout out to Gavin for helping me stop banging my head against the wall trying to build a library or fix an existing one.

Cheers!

I haven’t had much time lately to write any blogs, but I figure I’d post a few tidbits of some neat Rails, Javascript, web service, and AJAX widgets that I’ve had the pleasure of integrating on recent projects. I’ll start with a very simple Rails plug-in that I used for an online coupon redemption program.

It’s a barcode generator that uses the Gbarcode gem. It was a snap to integrate and I had barcodes on these online coupons in less than a day, fully tested.

http://code.google.com/p/barcode-generator/

The web app I used this on is not for public consumption, but feel free to email me and I can demonstrate.

Cheers,

Andy

This is very interesting.  This company is offering a free automated tool that will test your web site for Search Engine Optimization and give you a score based on how well your site is optimized.  It also gives specific tips on how to optimize it better.   VERY nice.

http://www.hubspot.com

All web developers should know that old versions of Internet Explorer are very bad at following standards.  They were the last of the big browsers to adopt image swapping early on, they’ve had their own flavor and interpretation of the Document Object Model over the years, and they don’t allow for the installation of multiple versions on one PC.  This last detail has made it hard for developers who don’t have 2 or 3 PCs lying around to test web site UIs with older versions of IE.  I’ll admit, the newest version of IE (7), isn’t too bad.  They’ve caught up to Firefox with tabbed browsing and following the DOM much closer, but it’s still slower and clunky, in my opinion.

Back to the point of this post.  Some wonderful developer out there has created this installer that allows you to have multiple versions of IE (all the way back to 1.0) installed on your machine at once.  I just installed it and it tore my CSS layout to SHREDS, but now I can fix it real-time.

Go grab this thing.  It’s wonderful.

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE 

I just upgraded to the newest version of the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox.  This thing is nuts.  The version I had previously didn’t have the DOM Inspector installed.  It also has a couple CSS features that I can’t believe I haven’t been using.  One of them is viewing the outlines of the CSS boxes along with the labels of the boxes.  That feature in conjunction with the RULER and the zoom in and out feature is just priceless for finding that quirky box padding or weird spacing.   If only they’d have these for IE, the stick in the mud when it comes to CSS development.

Another tool that I haven’t used yet, but looks to be invaluable is Firebug.  It allows you to edit the CSS of a page live, without saving or refreshing, and immediately seeing how it changes the page.  This seems to be a great way to see how your changes will affect the page, real-time, without bouncing back and forth between the editor and the browser.

Check it:   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

OK, back to work…

This is some neat stuff. Microsoft is introducing it’s web software Photosynth for organizing and viewing photos in a whole new way. It sure is. It’s made me say “Wow” several times but I’m not sure how practical it is, except for entertainment’s sake.

Check it out: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html

While doing some research for a client, I stumbled across ELGG, an open source social networking platform built on the LAMP framework. A lot of clients are buzzing about social networking, and it was interesting to find a platform that seems to get you up and running very quickly. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’m chomping at the bit to do so. Apparently, out of the box, it can handle registration, profile creation, image and video upload, groups, blogs, and a few other neat tidbits. I’ll report back when I’ve had some time to playing around with it.

Check it out for yourself: http://www.elgg.org