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 Judging Open

Judging for Rails Rumble 2008 opened today. I encourage you to step it up and go rate some applications that were crafted in 48 hours. To rate you’ll need an OpenID (one can be created from the Rails Rumble site) and some free time to test the applications out. As of right now you’ve got 9 days left, so step it into gear.

Visit the Rails Rumble site to register.

And don’t forget to rate RedMinutes ridiculously high.

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 update:

• Added mp3 attachments
• Attachments larger than 1MB will be linked to the REDLISTS server rather than attached to the email in order to not exceed inbox limits (and in order for us not to exceed our smtp bandwidth limit, hopefully)
• Subscription form widgets are active. Easily gain subscribers without them leaving your website.

Feel free to try all this stuff out yourself.
I’m doing all this updating here because we currently don’t have a company website. We’ll probably work on it.

Matt and I will also be participating in Rails Rumble this year and we’ve got a pretty cool idea for it.