rails - ReadWriteWeb

Remindr: Ruthlessly Hassle Yourself to Get Things Done

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:00:00 -0800

You've got a lot going on. And sometimes, no matter how many sticky notes you slap on your monitor, phone messages you leave for yourself, or pseudo meetings you put on your calendar, you still forget some very important things you need to do.

It's understandable. You're busy. But there's one last thing to try: Remindr, a service that helps you hassle yourself about things you want to remember to do.

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]]> Setting up the service is easy. There's no need to login or create and account. Simply enter a topic and the date and time - in 24 hour format. Don't worry about Greenwich Mean Time computations. Remindr uses your local time to schedule the message.

Once your topic and time are complete, you can choose from a variety of ways to have the service ping you: Twitter, Jabber/Gtalk, email, SMS, or all of the above. So, no matter where you are, it's highly likely you'll get the reminder about that thing you were supposed to do.

I put Remindr through a number of tests and each time it performed flawlessly, virtually tapping me on the shoulder at exactly the moment I needed it. Simple and effective. What more could you want?

Remindr was designed, coded, and deployed in less than 48 hours as part of the Rails Rumble, an annual contest designed to challenge Ruby on Rails developers to build simple Rails apps in a short period of time.

No doubt, you've already been planning a few New Year's resolutions about "doing a better job of managing your time." So, why not get a jump on it? To start hassling yourself about all those things you need to do, visit Remindr.

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What's the Biggest Rails App? It Doesn't Matter

Josh Catone — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:40:59 -0800

Once upon a time, whenever anyone asked, "But are there any big applications built on Rails?" The answer was usually, 43Things, anything from 37Signals, or Odeo. But over the past year, there's no doubt that if there is a poster child for Rails, it is now Twitter. With such notorious bouts of downtime, a worse poster child Rails could not possibly hope for. But is Twitter even the largest application out there running on Rails? Does it even matter?

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]]> "Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter [to explain downtime]," wrote Nik Cubrilovic in a recent post on TechCrunch calling out Rails as a poor choice for large scale app development. The debates over what causes Twitter's frequent outages (we think it's a database issue) and whether Rails is good for large apps aside, Twitter might not actually be the biggest Rails-based app out there anymore.

Some back of the napkin math by noted rails developer Evan Weaver (who recently went to work for Twitter), finds that while Twitter might be huge in terms of monthly pageviews, the Facebook app Friends for Sale, may still be bigger. And Yellopages and Scribd are similarly massive.

Ignoring the oddities in Weaver's computation (like, for example, that even though he works at Twitter he only guesses how much traffic the API is fielding), which he admits result in "wildly inaccurate values," he makes one very good final point: It doesn't matter!

"It is important to keep in mind how useless this information is. It doesn't even make sense to say 'Rails site' or 'PHP site,'" says Weaver. "Livejournal uses Perl, Memcached, and MySQL, among other things. Does that make it a Perl site, a MySQL site, or a C site? I don't know what Scribd uses, but it's pretty likely that their document pre-renderer is Java or C, not Ruby. Friends for Sale uses Nginx, Rails, Memcached, MySQL, and Linux. Ruby is really just a little piece of the pie."

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Rails Kits: Software as a Service Made Easy

Josh Catone — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:30:01 -0800

Ok, well, maybe not easy -- you do still have to build the software. But Rails Kits has created a software as a service "starter kit" that provides a pain-free way to add subscription management, recurring billing, and credit card management functionality to any Rails app. At the Web 2.0 Expo this week, software as a service was a major trend, enough so that Tim O'Reilly included the SaaS trend in his latest definition of the "Web 2.0" term.

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]]> Rails Kits is the brainchild of Ben Curtis, who pulled the code for the SaaS kit from his team recruiting tool Catch the Best. The kit is a collection of premade Ruby on Rails files that can plug into an app and handle things like account creation, management, billing (via the Braintree gateway), trials, and user management.

As Curtis says, Rails Kits are more than just plugins, they are complete code bases that can act as the foundation of an application. The SaaS kit is the first kit that Curtis is offering, though others are planned.

With more and more companies transitioning their software to online web apps and charging for them as a service, simplifying that process was bound to happen. The next step? We're sure it will be to offer Curtis' kit (or something like it) as a service itself. Yes, that's right, that would be Software as a Service as a Service. Makes sense, though, right?

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