BenCurtis.com

Do you have a site where you sell downloads? Perhaps you sell e-books, screencasts, or MP3s. Would you like a way to protect these downloads by using your Rails application to authenticate users before they can download the file, but you don’t want to tie up a Rails process to actually serve the file? Lighttpd’s mod_secdownload was built specifically for this situation, but there’s a little gotcha for those of you who are also using mod_proxy to pass traffic to mongrel…

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I was a little surprised to read about Confabb this morning. I’ve been working on a similar type of application, ConferenceMeetup, in my spare time.

After going to a few conferences, I really wanted a tool that could help me connect with other people while at the conference, so I built one. The idea behind the app is to provide a private community site for conferences where their attendees can learn about each other, connect with each other, and provide feedback to conference organizers and presenters about the presentations.

It’s been a fun project, partly because Rails makes it so easy to build these types of applications. I think that ConferenceMeetup would be useful to have at any conference. In fact, I appreciate the validation of having some smart people agree with me on the value of having such a service. :)

Update:

After reading Tim’s comment for this blog post, I was reminded that I didn’t mention Web Connections (which I had intended to do — sorry, Tim!), the app that he built that has the same sort of theme. I saw his app after building ConferenceMeetup and I really liked it. I agree with his comment that it really is about the community of people that are participating in the conference. Connecting with the people there makes the event much more enjoyable.

Are you a web developer who wants to know some tips or tricks about storing files in a database? Would you like a quick example on how to handle a file upload in Rails and stuff that file in your database? My answer to that question is don’t do it. Here’s why.

The database software you are most likely using is a relational database, which was designed to hold discrete and related chunks of data and to make it easy for you to retrieve that data based on relationships to other data. Your filesystem was designed to store and organize files and to make it easy for you to retrieve those files in a fairly random fashion. In other words, use the file system for storing files, not your database. Still not convinced? Alright, then I can give you an example.

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With all the job boards that have been popping up lately, I was starting to feel left out. So, I launched my own. :)

Go visit the newest “Ruby on Rails job board”:http://agilewebdevelopment.jobcoin.com to see jobs that will be advertised on every page of AgileWebDevelopment.com, the home of the “rails plugin directory”:http://www.agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins.

Jobs will list for $200 for 30 days, but I’m offering a $100 discount for the first week just to kick things off. If you use the coupon code EarlyBird before the 14th, you can list your job for $100 rather than $200.

Do we really need another job board? Yes, for two reasons:
# I do think there’s value in having a board that requires an up-front fee for posting, and so far there isn’t one that has a significant reach to the Rails community.
# This job board will be advertised on a site that gets a fair amount of traffic from Rails developers who aren’t necessarily looking for a job. In other words, this job board will be well placed for passive job seekers and accidental job discovery.

So, if you’re in the market, fire away and “post a job listing to find a Rails developer”:https://agilewebdevelopment.jobcoin.com/jobs/new. If you’re looking for a Rails job, wait a few days until there’s a post or two. :)

And congrats to the “JobCoin”:http://www.jobcoin.com crew. They’ve put together a cool service.

I was hoping that this would be the final book update, but I just haven’t had the time yet to write the last big chunk that’s left to be written: Integrating with payment gateways using “Active Merchant”:http://home.leetsoft.com/am.

So, instead of keeping people waiting, I decided to make this release, which isn’t quite as big as I was hoping it would be. I did toss in some fun stuff, though, like how to use the “dollars_and_cents plugin”:http://blog.codahale.com/2006/05/18/dollars_and_cents-a-rails-plugin/ for storing money amounts in the database and the “acts_as_sluggable plugin”:http://dev.2750flesk.com/acts_as_sluggable/ to help with “SEO”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization for your store. You can check out the “full list of changes”:http://www.agilewebdevelopment.com/book/changelog, and of course, you can also “buy it now”:http://www.agilewebdevelopment.com/rails-ecommerce!

Oh, and now you can even buy it without using PayPal, if you wish. I have set up Google Checkout so you can purchase it that way, although I currently don’t have the integration set up to automatically send the book to you after you cough up the dough. Perhaps I’ll get around to getting Google Checkout better integrated, and then I could add info on that to the book. :) Until then, if you use Google Checkout you’ll have to be a little patient, giving me time to get the notification email and send you the book manually.