Posts tagged with “ruby” and “portfolio”
Signal Chains (beta)
Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:
The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?
The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.
My Associate Cornelius
Matt and I have [mostly] finished working on screenprinter and all-around cool guy Micah Smith’s portfolio website. We built the news, contact, portfolio, and info sections. The store is just a link to his page on Blue Collar Distro.
Micah did the design himself, I mostly just focused on putting the thing together, and Matt made it work. I’m happy with the way it turned out, although I might have to redo some things in the portfolio section to make it more IE friendly. The emphasis is on might. I’m not sure if I want to be friendly to IE users.
The whole thing was built with Ruby on Rails. His blog, which is separate from the Rails server, is powered by Chyrp wearing a custom theme put together by yours truly.
Along with the front-end My Associate User Experience, we’re getting close to finishing a client section where clients can view proofs of current projects. However, this is Top Secret and no one can know about it but you.
Micah is now using RedLists for his mailing list. He’s our biggest user yet. Why not try and outdo him?
Rails Rumble Wrap Up
Rails Rumble is finally over. We finished 25th, so we can at least say we were in the top 25. I agree with most of the winners, but my top list would have been different. Anyway, it was fun and Matt and I are going to continue to work on RedMinutes and do some fun things with it. If you have any suggestions, let us know.
Be sure to check out the contestants if you haven’t already.
Rails Rumble 2008 - RedMinutes
Matt and I made it through Rails Rumble this weekend and actually finished what we planned on finishing.
From the Rails Rumble site:
“The Rails Rumble is a 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, you get one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby on Rails.”
I actually really like what we came up with more than I thought I would. Don’t consider this an official introduction, but this weekend Matt and I created RedMinutes, a web app for sharing notes.
Think of it as a Pastie or Writeboard type of service that splits notes up into sections for reading and commenting. It will take plain old text or Textile markup and generate a pretty little rainbow of colorful sections.
I’ve posted this blog entry1 as a RedMinutes demo note so you can see what the functionality is like without having to come up with some text. The password is demo.
Please register to be a judge and vote for us if you like RedMinutes, but be sure to check out all the other great contest entries. The contest just ended and judging starts soon.
I heavily enjoyed developing this with Matt. Of course, he handled all the complicated stuff that actually makes everything work and I just pretended I knew how to design something. My greatest joy in this project was a decision Matt and I made early on — not sweating Internet Explorer support2.
RedMinutes is functional in IE6 and IE7, but the layout gets a bit wonky. The application can be seen in its full glory using Safari 3 and Firefox 3, and in 90% of its glory using Opera3.
Anyway, let us know what you think. There will probably be something on the Relatively Early blog soon once we get all settled in.
1 The full Textile formatting of this post can be seen here.
2 …yet. I’m sure we’ll have to eventually.
3 No border-radius support yet. Rounded corners are used extensively in the design.
redlists Beta Launch
My buddy Matt and I have been working on our mailing list application/service, redlists, for quite a while now, and we’ve just launched the beta.
Redlists is a mailing list service that is remotely hosted and managed. Subscription management is handled by the subscribers themselves, rather than solely the list manager. When logged in to redlists, users can manage their subscription status and subscribe to new public lists.
Message archives, drafting, user management, and multiple list management are supported. Integrated tools are in the works, including widgets that can be plopped in your site and a contact importer (for those switching from another mailing list method that want to manually add subscribers.)
We are currently looking for beta testers. During the beta period, the service is free. Upon initial launch, rates will be announced. We still need to figure out how to cover our costs. If you would like to test the service or have any input on what you think appropriate pricing would be, please contact me at ross at redlists.com, or leave a comment on this post.
Redlists was written in Ruby on Rails. Matt and I made heavy use of Github and Lighthouse during development and have had a lot of fun with it. I am mainly responsible for the interface while Matt gets credit for pretty much all of the functionality.
Please let me know what you think!