Our Geek Space

Currently we are the developing team of blahsports. Since January 2010 we have been developing several new functionalities and administrating the whole Site.

Blahsports – www.blahsports.com

Blahsports is a social content website. As a user, you participate in determining all site’s content by providing, selecting, sharing, and discussing articles, pictures and videos that you like and feel that would be interesting to other people.

see the site …

Blah and technology

This project is based on PHP, codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com), Python and MYSQL.
It uses RSS and Web crowller application developed in Python to share all the sports content of a hundred sites.
We create a tag module which searches and identifies the language, sports and a set of tags for each content. For instance, if the content is “Forlan plays very well against Mexico” then the module will find out that the text is about Soccer, Forlan, Mexico and that the main language is English.

blah and a marketing campaign

We are making a marketing campaign to acquire and activate users.  We have a Maradona t-shirt as a prize for the winner among all the registered users … see the site … http://maradona.blahsports.com

This application was developed based on rails.

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As Rails developers we are all in love with keeping things simple. As Einstein said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. You may not agree with the theory of relativity, but you should really agree on this one.


A couple of months ago I started my final major project: an iPhone based application. It’s been a really great journey so far and I’ve learned so many amazing things about iPhone development. I found it very similar in some ways with Rails, being the biggest one the way they both keep things as simple as they should be. Well they both use the MVC architecture, but right now I’m talking beyond that stuff. It’s more about an ideology on how to build stuff, web and mobile applications in this case.

As an idea here at moove-it we thought of having an iPhone application for our faltauno.com project, kinda like facebook does. So the research began on how this could be done, the first (and probably definitely) answer appeared quickly. The guys at iphoneonrails.com have developed ObjectiveResource.

“ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.”. What’s not to love in that sentence? I won’t get into it since I haven’t used that much, and who could explain better than themselves?. In case you are thinking it will be too complex to get started, you can download the whole package with an example application that does all the basic stuff you are probably thinking on trying to do right now.

The example is a typical Rails application that can be handled using an iPhone application, which is also inside the example, you should of course have installed XCode. You then start the rails app and the iPhone simulator running the other one, and something kind of magic starts happening. What amaze me the most is the simplicity of the code you’ll need to write (of course ). Really try it out it’s worth it.


Don’t forget to tell us about your experience!

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Hey, thanks for coming back for part 2. I know it took some time to start writing this second part, it’s just that facebook keeps getting better and keeps taking my time away (don’t tell Conrado).

If I remember correctly in Part 1 we ended up with facebooker installed, configured and running. We even added the facebook connect button and explained how to use some of the great facebooker helpers. As promised in my last post we are going to explain a bit how the magic happens with XFBML, invite friends and publish feed items.

XFBML

Facebook uses XFBML as a way for you to incorporate FBML (Facebook Markup Language, an extension to HTML) into an HTML page on a Facebook Connect site or an iframe application. read more here.

This is a typical XFBML tag, it brings up the profile picture of the user with the uid=”12345″.

<fb:profile-pic uid="12345" facebook-logo="true" linked="false" width="300" height="400"></fb:profile-pic>

What’s happening here? Facebook is turning this into a typicall HTML <img> tag. They do this using a Javascript cross-domain communications library. You can read more here if you are interested. This is all done for you when using Facebooker.

Boring right? Let’s invite some friends to our connect site to keep things more interesting.

Inviting Friends

If you went through the facebooker helpers you are probably thinking about using fb_multi_friend_selector to select friends. Well you are right! We’ll be using that helper, but we will need it inside another helper that is fb_request_form. There’s also another helper that could help us that is fb_multi_friend_request, which is basically the first two together, but we are going to use the first option. Here’s the resulting code:

<% fb_serverfbml do %>
<script type="text/fbml">
<fb:fbml>
<% content_for("invite_user") do %>
<%= "Check out my brand new FB Connect site.  Lots of good stuff in there! #{fb_req_choice('Check it out!', login_users_url)}" %>
<% end %>
<% fb_request_form("GetUnbored","invite_user", login_users_url) do %>
<%= fb_multi_friend_selector("Invite your friends to check out this site", :showborder => true,
:exclude_ids => facebook_session.user.friends_with_this_app.map(&:id).join(","), :condensed => false) %>
<% end %>
</fb:fbml>
</script>
<% end %>

I don’t want to explain something that’s already out there in many places, I will just describe a bit what’s going on. We put things inside a fb_serverfbml, because we are in a facebook connect site and need users interaction with facebook directly (that is when selecting their friends). The content_for(”invite_user”) is the content that will be show in the fb_request_form. The fb_request_form is a facebook form used when we need to submit information to facebook.

And the fb_multi_friend_selector is the nice facebook like friend selector. You can choose condensed => true to show an ugly smaller one. The exclude_ids => facebook_session.user.friends_with_this_app.map(&:id).join(”,”) is pretty great, it makes the friend selector not to show the friends who are already using our facebook connect site.

Anyway, you can get much more things done, here are some of the facebooker helpers to do anything you like with them . And of course the facebook developers wiki is a great place for starting and becoming a guru. I will add in other post the publishing feeds part.

Enjoy!

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Reducing the number of request made to the server improves the performance of a web application in about 80%.

There are many techniques that allow us to reduce the amount of requests that are made on a page, among them are: the sprites, put the stylesheets on top of the page, javascripts compress, among others.

But what’s offered by Rails to improve the performance of our web application?

It offers a great plugin called bundle_fu (http://code.google.com/p/bundle-fu/)
It allows us with a single request obtain all the javascripts and with another request all the stylesheets  (it also offers the possibility of compress javascripts).
Using this plugin is really easy but it’s very powerfull

<% bundle do -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag :default -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript1" -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript2" -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript3" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style1" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style2" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style3" -%>
  ...
<% end %>

All these javascripts and stylesheets are converted in only two files when the request is processed.

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Locos x Rails is the first conference in the Southern Cone dedicated to the ground-breaking Ruby on Rails framework. Locos por Rails Conference 2009 will be held on April 3rd and 4th in Buenos Aires, Argentina. South America’s most popular travel destination is the perfect backdrop for two days of local and international presentations, networking, and fun.

Part of the moove-iT development team attended to this event. Bellow you will find some nice pictures!

See more photos on facebook group and keep the thread news at locosxrails twitter.

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So you want to build your own social network site on rails? As you probably know, there are many plugins around to add social functionality to your site, and there are also some open source platforms that provide you with complete social network functionality. Some of them are Lovd by Less, comunity engine, tog, etc. These platforms, as rails premises, are based in the idea of not reinventing the wheel. In this post we’ll be referring about tog our experience installing it and trying it out.

Why are we using tog? Actually we are not using it, we are just doing a proof of concept trying out the different platforms and getting to know each of them. The idea behind this is to have enough knowledge to, according to our clients requirements, select the best solution for them and for us in order to save our clients some money by reducing our development time.

What is tog? Tog is a non-intrusive, extensible open source platform that helps you to add social network features to your Ruby on Rails apps. We aim to convert the tedious and long process of creating a community site on a straightforward process that will give your site social capabilities in minutes. (from www.toghq.com/)

Installing tog may not be a simple procedure for a Rails beginner, but the install process is very well explained in their wiki. After following the procedure you will have installed a very complete and expandable social network. It is composed by many plugins developed by tog and some by 3rd parties. After installing the basic plugins you can install more plugins that will easily adapt to the default site.

Tog is today in version 0.4, which means you will probably find some bugs and things to fix. Here are some we ran into:

1. After running the togify command the following error may appear: “error  There has been a problem trying to unpack the tog_core tarball downloaded from github. Remove the changes made on your app by togify and try again. Sorry for the inconveniences. We found the solution in the project assembla here
2. In the migration create_posts from plugin tog_conversation the line t.datetime :published_at is missing

Another thing you shouldn’t forget is to set up your email conf, since some plugins may depend on the user activation like the message ones (I tried to manually activate some users, and then had to manually fix some things than an observer was supposed to do after activation)

The greatest thing about tog is the ease of extending it. You can read about it here. Basically you can override any behavior you want just by creating models, controllers or views like you would normally do in your apps. On the cons side, it may be a bit complex finding out what functionality is where, to override with your own. The idea is to not touch the plugins and use new controllers, models, etc to extend. This will allow plugins to be updated when they need to, without affecting your site’s working functionality.

In conclusion, I think tog is a very promising platform that may be a great solution for building social networks on the go, allowing us to extend them to meet our needs. This may be a good solution for a user who just wants his site running. If you want to customize too much about it, you should consider other platform or starting from scratch.

We are right now working on adding Facebook Connect to a demo site we are building with tog, please come back to know how that went

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