Tag : Ruby on Rails

We’re looking for a few people to join us and so we’re asking about to see if anyone knows anyone. We need some creative geeky types with an obsession for the new Web who like making things.

Recently, someone in the office asked, “Who here was the last person to be picked for a team in the school playground?” Around half the company put their hands up – and that’s the kind of freaks we’re interested in meeting.

Recently Rails 2.3 was released, with a number of new features.

One of these was the ability to set the created_at/updated_at time-stamped columns manually. Now, why anybody would want to do this currently escapes me – but that aside, those columns are now attr_accessible.

This means that anybody can set them by manually editing the forms on your site, so you can’t trust them to be correct. Your audit trail is no longer valid.

Well, the uprising against IE 6 has begun, and not a moment too soon – IE 6 will be seven years old on August 27th. In fact, there’s even a service to say goodbye to the old dinosaur.

You can do your bit for the Internet by showing a warning to IE 6 users in your Rails applications, or disabling it completely for those users, encouraging them to upgrade their browsers (or nag the relevant Sys Admin).

Firstly you need to install the UserAgent plugin by Josh Peek:
script/plugin install git://github.com/josh/useragent.git

[Update (10 April 2010): we've edited the tutorial to bring it up to date with the current incarnations of Facebook Connect, Facebooker and Rails.]

Back in June 2007 I wrote a popular tutorial on writing Facebook platform applications with Ruby On Rails. Time has moved on and Facebook has launched Facebook Connect which allows you to integrate Facebook into your own sites allowing authentication, registration, friend connecting, and Facebook feed posting in the context of your application. Mashable has a great post on 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect including Joost, Vimeo and Disqus.

At Made By Many we are fans of the possibilites of Facebook Connect for lowering barriers to registration, extracting social graph and injecting your social media functions into the daily online life of users. There is little point trying to create a “new” facebook on your site. Your unique social proposition lies elsewhere with your content, community and tools.

I’ve recently been doing a bit of Rails auditing, and I thought that I’d just run through the main things I check; all fairly generic attacks that aren’t specific to particular Rails websites.

SQL injection
Actually, I haven’t seem much of this, probably because it’s one of the more well known attacks and people generally seem to be aware of it.

A few weeks ago I was quoted in a New Media Age article about Ruby On Rails and the London agency market (available online for subscribers) and it’s worth following up a few things, especially on Made By Many’s involvement with Rails.

At Made By Many we like to remain technology agnostic, which is why we don’t have a large team of developers. We feel this benefits us and our clients more by not overly invested in one thing that limits our creative output and may not be the best solution for our clients. This enables us to consult on the whole range of technology strategies and lets us play with best technologies around.

I met Will Stephens for a beer last week in a pub in Williamsburg (I can’t remember what it was – very hoppy) to find out more about Beer Menus – a very cool beer, bar and map mashup covering Manhattan and Brooklyn. Will had a terrific story to tell about the new service. It launched in March this year and now carries details of nearly 300 venues/beer menus, and 1,514 individual types of beer.

Here at Made By Many we are technology agnostic. Primarily because we believe a client should use the best technology solutions to fit them and fit the problem we are trying to solve. We work with lots of in-house technology teams and out-sourced partners for clients, offering technologyconsultancy wrapped into a holistic offering on next-generation website problems.

That’s not to say we don’t have technology preferences. With all things being equal for greenfield deployments we can work with the best technology to do the job. That’s why we have delivered several solutions using Ruby On Rails and use WordPress for delivering blog solutions, such as this one.