In a super secret project I’m currently working on, I’ve been looking for ways of making it easier for people to interact with the system without the need to log in to the website. That’s included the obvious things like having a RESTful API so they can put their own services and interfaces on top, but that only works for developers or 3rd party application providers. What about your average Joe on the street, how come they get forced into having to log in to the site to update their data, etc.? Why not provide a means of carrying out simple tasks in an application they probably already have? And so an Instant Messaging interface was designed to send a instruction to a robot, and it’s relatively simple to get setup.

Heard about microformats ? Want to know how to consume them within your rails app? It’s a suprisingly simple task. But why would you bother? Well lets take a somewhat practical example. What if on your site you wanted to include a list of upcoming events that you were either attending or might be of use to your users? Say for example, events in the UK for the next 30 days

Apologies to all for the extended hiatus, I was in the US for a month on holiday… and then I just got lazy. Anyway, I’m back and plugging someone else’s extension. I came across ActiveRecord Extension last night, and was quite frankly dumbfounded that 1) I hadn’t come across it before, and 2) More people weren’t using it. In short, it will let you use ActiveRecord to batch insert multiple rows in a single query, rather than looping over the Model#create method and getting all the overhead that comes with it (and the hundred insert statements).