plasticrain.com

Well, I registered – one of the very first “teams” registered as my user ID is 4! Sadly the registration process had a few delays and then the DNS didn’t propogate fully (so in order to register I needed to add my own hosts entry to their IP).

66.148.74.15    registration.railsrumble.com

The application I’m developing is a concept we thought about about a year ago called boxwatch but never really got around to building it – so this is a good time to get it built. I won’t say much about the actual concept at the moment, but I’ll document the process on this blog and I’m planning on filming the 48 hours and then speeding it up into about 3 minutes – mainly to see what I look like when I work – fun huh?!

As I right now, 50 of the 150 seats have been taken and registration has only been open for about 40 minutes, so if you wanted to register, head over http://registration.railsrumble.com and enter your details.

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At 7pm this evening registration for RailsRumble 2007 opens, and I haven’t decided whether or not to enter. I have an idea but I don’t know if I’ll be free at the weekend for long enough to actually complete it.

This would have been a brilliant time to build Railsify, but I’ve already done that and don’t really want to start from scratch (and I’m sure plenty of people would assume I had cheated and copied code from the original site).

Aaah, I’m annoyed that I built Railsify so early now!

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Well here we go again, another week, another site launch – this time we’re launching Railsify, a Ruby on Rails plugin directory. I started work on Saturday morning and deployed at lunchtime on Monday – talk about a quick turnaround. During this time, I designed the site, planned my implementation and actually built the site using Rails.

Railsify is an attempt to create a centralized directory of Ruby on Rails plugins, making it easier to find for new users as well as more experienced ones. It’s our/my way of giving something back to the Rails community.

Users can add their own plugins and they can also add plugins that belong to other developers. Registered users can also bookmark their favourite plugins and become fans of other users (for example, if a member has provided some cool plugins, you may wish to recommend their work to others). Anybody can register whether you’re plugin developer or just a Rails user – and, obviously, it’s all free!

Plugins are sorted into various categories (final list still to be decided) and plugins can belong to up to 3 categories at a time. All plugins have an easy to copy Rails install command so you can easily copy and paste it directly into your shell to install the plugin. A plugin can also build up comments from any registered users.

There are still a few things which we need to iron out should (hopefully) the site get busy such as implementing some sort of plugin quality checking and a way to rate plugins so more popular ones are shown higher on lists.

Railsify will also download any README and CHANGELOG files from your subversion repository and include them as part of your listing. Alternatively, you can write your own readme and change log independent of your SVN repo.

There are also some other cool features but you need to discover them for yourself. So, pop over to railisfy.com and take a look for yourself.

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Well here it is… the brand new PlasticRain website and its here to stay (unlike many other of its ancestors).

The new website is powered by my own creation, RainMaker – a very small blog engine which does exactly what it says on the tin, allows me to post entries, accept comments and provide an RSS feed.

There are few things left to do, but as I just wanted to get the site launched, I’ve left them out for a day or two:

• <title> attributes need setting to be relevent to the page currently being browsed
• A few minor tiny browser compatability issues
• A few changes need to be made to the admin system to make it slightly more fun
• The homepage blog preview needs formatting to ensure images and long links are truncated or resized as appropriate to fit the small space.

Full details about the new site can be found on the about and credits pages.

Enjoy!

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A simple backup plugin for backing up mysql databases and compressing them on linux systems.

It uses mysqldump and tar to create and compress the backups. Details of the backup are then saved into a ‘database_backups’ table which contains the filename, path and file size as well as the date created.

SVN: http://svn.plasticrain.com/stuff/rails/plugins/mysql_backup

Install:

./script/plugin install / 
http://svn.plasticrain.com/stuff/rails/plugins/mysql_backup

As usual, if you have any comments or suggestions please let me know

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