Cody Marx Bailey, a partner in Downtown Cartel, was recently interviewed by our friend Lynn Bender of GeekAustin.org. As an integral part of the scene in Bryan/College Station, he has brought a lot of attention to what was traditionally a low-tech culture.
The Downtown Cartel crew try to make it over to Austin several times a month to attend different events, functions, and networking opportunities so keep an eye for us if you see us out and about.
I’ll be honest, I’m a Merbaholic. I think about Merb, I dream about Merb, I even bought a pug and named him Merb (points to you if you get that last joke). Well…part of that is true. I do, however, use it for all my new projects. As with any project a common need is user authentication, cause you gotta have users. There’s merbful_authentication a port of Rick Olson’s restful_authentication to merb, but that didn’t seem to fit with the philosophy behind Merb. It was very railsy with the generators in options. I decided there had to be a better way. Ben and I talked about came up with a baisc idea of how it should work, but never did anything with it. Then I read Aaron Wheeer’s post about distributed mvc and decided to get off my ass and do it. The end result is two gems can_has_auth, which works with datamapper 0.3.x, and can_has_auth_core, which works with the latest trunk of dm-core.
So why distributed mvc instead of generators? First, you can’t really test generators. You can test the code they generate, but you can’t really test the templates, which makes it harder to debug. This approach has specs in the gem that test the code throughly. This isn’t meant to be the end all be all of user models and authentication, it just gives you a nice set of defaults to build on. It has default templats, which will be over written if you create a view of the same in the appropriate folder (e.g /views/user/new.html.*). If you want to extend any of the models or classes you can just re-open them by adding a file of the same name in you app directory. So in other words it works with your code rather than replacing it like restful_auth does. If you need to really customize the code create a gems directory in your app and run “gem install can_has_auth -i /path/to/gems/directory” and it will put all the code in you app. Oh and it use it in your app you only need one line of code. In init.rb add ‘dependency “can_has_auth”‘ and you’re good to go. It’s hard not to love that.
The gem also includes something neat I wrote that isn’t in restful_auth, restful password management. This allows users to reset their password if forgotten and then change it after entering a reset code. It also allows logged in users to change their current passwords. This is all tested by specs. Also the controller specs only test the controller logic. It bothered me that the controller specs were testing model logic (such as whether or not a user had a login). I have more plans for the plugin including configuration options for catpcha or email for authentication and whether to use an email or a login name to identify a user. For now check out the gems and give me feedback.
Somehow I missed the fact that an interview I did while at the BIL Conference in March was posted to YouTube. For those of you who don’t know what BIL is, it’s an unconference that was held outside of the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Several members from the Creative Space helped plan the event and made the trek out to California.
When we started Downtown Cartel, I was pretty naive about how to go about building a client base. The last several months have been a crash course in that. I have a lot to learn still, but I think I have made significant progress. Here are a few things I have learned along the way.
The last couple weeks I have been going through my GMail, Linked In, and Facebook contacts and finding a ton of people that I forgot I knew (sorry friends!). One by one I am going through and contacting them individually, catching them up on what I am doing with the business and letting them know we are actively seeking client work. It really amazes me, but the most unlikely friends and family can bring you some of your best business.
One of the quickest ways to sell yourself to a potential client is to make it easy for them to choose you. To do that be willing to help them cut costs on the projects they bring you. Sometimes that will mean cutting your rates a bit, or sometimes helping them identify the core features that they really need. Look for innovative ways to create extra value in their project at no additional cost.
When you begin a project with a new client often you are implementing just the first version of what their ultimate product will be. Make sure you work closely with them to achieve their vision of what the end product will be like. You can achieve this by giving your clients the opportunity to provide regular feedback on the progress of your work. If you are not giving your client that opportunity at least every 2 weeks you are probably doing something wrong. Alternatively, if you see that their vision is a bit misguided but there is great value in their idea, help them see a different, better vision for the product. If you can do this, you will win clients for life.
This will be the first in a series of posts about the pending release of our complete rewrite of Hashtags. Why did we rewrite it? Simple, it started out as an experiment and the traffic has grown. What start out as a thought experiment with two people now has a team of four behind it. Unfortunately two of the four know ruby and the person who originally wrote it developed it in python. In order for all of us to contribute we found in necessary to move it over to ruby, specifically Merb. This allows us to a better work flow to optimize the site as well as work on new features, which we have a lot planned.
So what can you expect from the new site? Well for one, it’ll be faster. We’re using memcache to cache most of the pages as fragments and also caching slow running methods, like creating the nifty graphs. So hopefully we won’t see the slow downs that have happened on the current site. What else? Well we’re now receiving the xmpp public feed, this means we’re now tracking every message. There have been some ui tweaks as well. We’ve layout out the messages on the main page a little different, we think for the better. We’ve also changed up the navigation to make it easier for us as we start adding features.
The other big news is now you can have Hashtags user accounts. Why is this good? It’ll will allow you to track certain tags and then have a custom page that will display message from those tags. We’re also looking at the ability to recommend tags or users based on which tags you are tracking, so look forward to that.
We’ll keep you updated as we get closer to releasing it, we’re shooting towards the end of may for now. Also we’re looking for some beta testers, so let us know if you’re interested.
Downtown Bryan, TX recently stepped it up a notch when our good friends over at Square One Bistro began announcing the lunch special and soup of the day over twitter. Yes, every day around 11:15, I get a little update with what’s being served for lunch.
I think this is a great way for non-tech businesses to have somewhat persistent contact with their users, err, patrons. I’m sure plenty of restaurants have an RSS feed of different things like events and specials - it’s time they move them to Twitter.
The Creative Space, the coworking space we operate out of, held BarCampTexas a few months ago. Travis Ward wore the shirt today and I sorta got to thinking about the process that unfolded as we planned our first BarCamp. I thought I’d post a few tips to sorta help those out there that might be planning a BarCamp for the first time.
If you have any other tips, just tweet them out using the hashtag #barcamptips. Or leave them in the comments section below. Thanks.
I just wanted to let you folks know that we hit 5,000 users of hashtags yesterday around 8PM. Thanks to everyone who has ever used a hashtag!
I’ve been playing around with Fluid, the free site specific browser for Mac OS X Leopard, for a while now and recently came up with a really interesting way to browse hashtags.org. I’ll briefly cover the steps involved to browse hashtags.org using coverflow and fluid.
Chimeric has released a really nifty script for greasemonkey (Firefox extension) that links hashtags on the twitter website to our site. Pretty plain and simple but highly useful.
