26 Miles

The Rubynator

// August 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

My friend Geof has for years attempted to persuade of me of the pure awesomeness of Ruby on Rails, and the many ways that it excels over any other language/framework. So in honor of his efforts to constantly evangelize me with the “Oh is much easier in Rails” (and of Dr. Doofenshmirtz, one of my cartoon heroes), I think I’ll start calling him The Rubynator.

I’m no neo-luddite, and I’m generally an early adopter, but have approached Ruby and Rails with only an arms-length interest. But having spent some time this summer doing my own research, I’ve become convinced to embrace it on a couple of big projects at work that are separate platforms from our core product. I’m looking forward to it. One thing I’ve noticed (how can you miss it, they practically yell it), is how much I enjoy and appreciate the culture that’s developed alongside Ruby on Rails in terms of making applications and code elegant, concise, readable, and easy to maintain. The Rails framework seems to make it easy to do things the right way, and I believe the lessons we’ll learn in developing RoR applications will help my team and I become better developers in general, regardless of the development environment we use, and I’m excited about that.

I’m also looking forward to attending the Lone Star Ruby Conference this weekend in Austin and seeing what I can learn.

In Search of The Best Issue Tracking System

// July 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

We’re currently using Eventum, which I really, really like. The only issues I’ve had so far with it are there seems to be no way I can find for unregistered users to check the status of tickets they submitted (e.g., simple public report) and internal notes get routed to everyone on the notification list (would be nice if it routed only to registered users with a certain role on the project). Otherwise it has pretty much everything I could want. I may end up writing reports to solve my status-checking woes and making a simple PHP form where requestors can enter there email address and it will return all the tickets they submitted or are on the notification list for and info about those tickets. But I’m wondering if there’s not something better out there.

I spent 7 years using Request Tracker, which was nice in many ways. Biggest drawback with it was poor handling of attachments and lack of reporting (maybe I was using an old version…). I’ve tried FogBugz for a few months, and it was good, but again not happy with reporting and depth of features. Looked at Trac (nice but light on features), Lighthouse (very feature-light), Mantis (lightweight), Bugzilla (you’re kidding, right?). JIRA totally rocks but I’ve owned houses that cost less than what it’d take to use JIRA at my company. Looked at Redmine (promising but can’t determine if it’s better than Eventum).

Here’s what I’m looking for:

1. Free or very cheap (~ $10/month per registered user)
2. MySQL-based
3. Preferably open source / GPL
4. Preferably PHP, but could do RoR or Perl, don’t want .Net, Java or Python
5. Un-registered users can submit issues via email to specific projects/queues
6. Robust email routing/notification
7. Un-registered users can easily see the status / discussion on their issues
8. Robust reporting (charts/graphs, gantt would be nice)
9. Subversion integration
10. Highly customizable

Anyone want to offer suggestions / feedback?

Google Mashup-O-Matic

// June 8th, 2007 // No Comments » // Technology

Well…almost.

For all of you aspiring to make your first million by wedding your livelihood to Google’s P&L’s … they have a new product for you.

Google has released the Google Mashup Editor to beta.

Simply put, it does this:

The Google Mashup Editor provides simple tools and features that allow you to create mashups in minutes.

• A set of tags that compiles into AJAX UI components
• Syntax highlighting
• Autocomplete of gm tags by pressing the tab button
• Quick access to documentation for any tag by pressing F2
• File upload and management
• Error checking and notification

So, Google once again has made it stupid-simple to begin monetizing SaaS PIG’s and launch a Micro-ISV empire! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

BillingOrchard’s Online Billing Service

// March 4th, 2007 // No Comments » // Business & Politics, Life

I have to write a long overdue plug for my favorite online billing service. I’ve used BillingOrchard for around 5 years now and have found their service and features to be outstanding.

Here’s a short list of the features I really like (my list):

• Recurring billing — Setup recurring fees, generate invoices automatically and email them to your clients.
• Multi-user, role-based access — You can setup limited-access accounts for employees and contractors can have their own accounts to log their hours.
• Robust set of reports — Every report I’ve ever needed. You can also export your data to Excel and massage it however you want
• Client portal — You can give your clients access to view their own invoices and payment history.
• PayPal/Credit Card Payments — You can provide a PayPal link on your electronic invoices or (for a nominal fee) integrate your Authorize.net account into your payment system.

These are just a few of the features they have. There are other similar services available (Quicken.com comes to mind), but it’s always seemed like a great deal for the price.

For only $14.95 per month, you have full access to most features. Starting at $19.95 per month, you can add automated invoicing and Authorize.net^tm automated recurring billing. For an additional $10.00 per month, you get access to their support ticket system / help desk.

When I first started looking for this kind of service in 2002, the options were fairly limited. Nowadays the space is more crowded and options are diverse. But for my needs, I’ve never seen a compelling reason to switch. BillingOrchard provides everything I need at a great price.

Easy Family Portal

// January 12th, 2007 // No Comments » // Technology

Some years back, say 2000, I wrote my PHP/MySQL-based family portal (which we still use today). I wanted a site that supported user-authentication and allowed users to self-manage their own login credentials.

At the time, the market had a small handful of photo-sharing services or open-source apps but nothing that could do everything I wanted like I wanted it done, so I was left with either having a wide-open, public site or writing my own software. I chose to roll-my-own.

As of today, features I’ve built into my site include:

• A family address book
• A shared calendar
• Blog pages for each family member
• Blog archives
• Photo-pages for each family member
• Member comments
• Some basic reports showing traffic patterns
• A simple admin interface that allows me to grant/deny access to the portal
• A family blog with a pretty sophisticated photo-navigation system

Someday, I’d still like to build in:

• Photo and video tagging
• An advanced search engine
• User-configurable CSS-based themes
• A centrally-accessible video library
• A CMS to speed updating the site

I’m also tightly wedded to the application architecture and file structure for many of the features so it’s not very portable.

Today, a friend sent me a link to the Easy Family Portal.

It’s a Ruby on Rails application and has some promising features for others seeking similar features, specifically authentication. But it also builds in some other niceties like email lists, gift lists, and some basic WYSIWYG CMS-like features.

Honestly my portal does a whole lot more than this one at this stage, but presuming it’s under active development (which mine isn’t), it may surpass my site in terms of features before long.

For anyone starting out with putting a family website together, it looks like it could be the start to a pretty solid platform.