RE07.US continues to make me smile. Last night’s update added a couple neat things;
I’ve got some ideas on where this technology could be useful, if you do as well, leave a comment.
According to a recent post by FuelInteractive.com, a link in Twitter is clicked for 5 minutes, then completely ignored.
That got me thinking about all the wasted short urls out there. So many tinyurl, culld.us, is.gd, et al, links just collecting dust after all that initial clicking.
Seems so wasteful considering “the current economic climate”. Maybe, we don’t need all those URLs. Maybe we should tighten our belts and limit ourselves to 1 short url – and continually reuse it.
With that in mind, I built HTTP://RE07.US. It’s 1 short url that we can all share.
All long URLs get shortened to the same link: RE07.US. And, it will be shortened to that – until someone else shortens their long URL to RE07.US. And so on and so on.
REDUCE. REDIRECT. RECYCLE.
As I mentioned earlier, one of my goals for this year is to launch 2 revenue-generating projects. I took a couple hours this morning and started the ball rolling on 2 of the potential candidates to fulfill that goal.
Here’s the checklist I use to lay the foundation for a project:
I started building up new project today, one of the 2 initial revenue generating projects on my 2009 list. While it’s a way from launching, much of the heavy lifting was completed today. Conceptually, I’ve been using a proof-of-concept of this project for a couple years now. Oh, and I spent waaaay to long looking for domain names for it. The Code Name thus far has been ‘Cashboard’ – but since it’s not available, it needs to be changed.
Remember the Quicksilver to WordPress Applescript I wrote a while back?
Well, I’ve ported it to Ruby.
The QSPress.rb works the same as the Applescript version, with a couple of tweaks – you can now set categories, flag if a post should be a draft, and upload files – all from Quicksilver.
The full instructions are in the script itself. Enjoy.
I maintain a WordPress blog that’s primarily an extension of iPhoto, and the various iPhoto plugins (Photon by Daikini, Photon by Orby, WordPress Export) I’ve tried over the years seem to have stopped being maintained, stopped working, or both.
Which is fine, they never worked exactly the way I wanted them too anyway.
So, I wrote one.
In Ruby, with some help from rb-appscript
Unlike like the other iPhoto export options, this one lives in your Scripts menu and automatically creates (and opens!) a draft post containing all the selected images.
Download send_selected_photos_to_wordpress.rb
There are a number of ways increase Ruby on Rails performance through caching. Caching works because things don’t change….or don’t change frequently.
In Cullect, almost everything is dynamic, even Cullect’s HTML presentation format has 3 different states depending on access privileges and there are 8 other presentation formats available.
The standard page, action, and fragment caching make less sense when the ‘heaviest’ data are also the most dynamic – the feed items.
For the feed items, I’m using a building a custom memcached name-value-pair holding 10 attributes describing the request as the key name and the items themselves as the key value.
From the ‘show’ action in my controller:
key = "
#{item_count}:
#{attribute_1}:
#{attribute_2}:
#{attribute_3}:
#{attribute_4}:
#{etc...}"
Notice the first attribute in the key is the total number of items within a specific Cullect Reading List – which will change when a feed updates or an item is hidden – automatically expiring stale caches.
Then, I check the cache for the key and pull the items from the cache if it exists.
if Cache.get(key)
@allitems = Cache.get(key)
If there’s no key in the cache, I do the query and put the retrieved items into the cache.
else
@allitems = get_items(attribute_1, attribute_2, attribute_3, attribute_4, etc)
Cache.put key, @allitems
end
While this speeds up subsequent requests, there’s still the question of speeding up the initial request. I’ll save that for part 2.
I just got word one of the projects I’m involved with at Best Buy launched today:
Best Buy Forums
The team that pulled it together really ‘gets’ online communities and was a pleasure to work with.
Add this to Remix.BestBuy.com, Giftag, and Blue Shirt Nation, and yeah, there’s a stack of very cool work happening over at the corner of 494 & 35W.
Back in Part 1 of Building a Wiki with Ruby on Rails, we built the core wiki engine.
Time to add some syntax formatting.
These days, I’m pretty enamored of Haml, it’s more like HTML (unlike many other formatting engines) and it’s fast to write (unlike many other formatting engines).
Haml installs as a gem…1
gem install --no-ri haml
and a plugin…
haml --rails path/to/your/wiki
Open up app/views/show.html.erb
and convert it to Haml. Replacing it to:
.content
%h1= @page.title.gsub('_', ' ')
= link_to('Edit', page_edit_path(:page_title => @page.title))
= link_to('History', page_history_path(:page_title => @page.title))
= "Last Updated #{time_ago_in_words(@page.revisions.last.created_on)} ago by #{Person.find(@page.revisions.last.person_id).name}"
%p= auto_link(@page.revisions.last.parsed_contents)
Now, your wiki should look exactly like it did before we plugged in Haml.
Open up app/models/revision.rb and update def parsed_contents with:
def parsed_contents
contents = contents.gsub(/(w*_w*)/) {|match| "<a href='#{match.downcase}'>#{match.gsub('_', ' ')}</a>"}
h = Haml::Engine.new(contents)
h.to_html
end
Load up a page in your wiki, click ‘edit’, and add in some simple Haml, something like:
%strong this should be bold
Once you’re comfortable with Haml, maybe add in some other simple formatting rules into revision.rb
#Auto-renders any image URL
contents = self.contents.gsub(/s(.*.(jpg|gif|png))s/, '<img src="1"/>')
# Bolds text inside asterisks
contents = contents.gsub(/*(.*)*/, '<strong>1</strong>')
# Wraps <code> around text inside '@'
contents = contents.gsub(/@(.*)@/, '<code>1</code>')
# Blockquotes text inside double-quotes
contents = contents.gsub(/s"(.*)"s/, '<blockquote>"1"</blockquote>')
# Italicizes text inside underscores
contents = contents.gsub(/s_(.*)_s/, '<em>1</em>')
After playing around with Haml and other formatting, you’ll quickly see some quirks – some room for improvement. Go for it, and let me know when you get something interesting.
1. Remember to vendor your gems.