The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 2 (Implementation Details)

February 13th, 2010

“He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 2 (Implementation Details)

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In this series I will document my approach to building a web business called Watchdoggie.com. It’s a product that continually monitors your website or blog and sends you a notice if your site ever goes down. I’m hoping this series will be helpful to web entrepreneurs. I also expect it will be helpful for me to document on my own experience and reflect on it later.

In this part I cover the implementation details involved in developing the site. If you missed the first part, you can catch it here The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 1.

This episode sets the foundation for the technologies used in delivering the site. The following pieces all play a role:

Will this series be helpful to you? Do you have any ideas on how I can improve the product, or my development process? Comment and let me know.

The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 1 (Business Development)

February 13th, 2010

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Larry Elder

The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 1 (Business Development)

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In this series I will document my approach to building a web business called Watchdoggie.com. It’s a product that continually monitors your website or blog and sends you a notice if your site ever goes down. I’m hoping this series will be helpful to web entrepreneurs. I also expect it will be helpful for me to document on my own experience and reflect on it later.

In this part I show the very first steps in establishing an online presence and a brand for your product. In the even-numbered parts I will demonstrate the technical implementation details.

This episode covers selecting and registering your domain name, choosing a look and feel, and designing your brand and logo. The following services are used to do this:

Will this series be helpful to you? Do you have any ideas on how I can improve the product, or my development process? Comment and let me know.

Installing the nanite gem in JRuby

January 13th, 2010

“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” — Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I ran into a small problem while trying to get the nanite gem working under JRuby. I just wanted to post a quick heads up with a solution. Hopefully google can somehow route people here that have the same problem.

First you need to install the dependencies amqp, eventmachine and jruby-openssl, which should install without a hitch (jgem install amqp eventmachine jruby-openssl).

But now a jgem install nanite will complain about building native extensions. This is because it’s trying to use the json gem. This is easily fixed by first installing the json-jruby gem, then modifying nanite’s Rakefile to point to this gem as a dependency instead of the regular json.

Now a jgem install nanite should work.

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 2

January 11th, 2010

“A list is only as strong as its weakest link.” — Donald Knuth

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 2

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Reviewing Stuart Halloway’s Programming Clojure, introducing the delicious social bookmarking engine, sharing a cool slideshow presentation on The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs, demonstrating Node.js and MacRabbit’s CSSEdit.

How are you spending your time? What are you learning about? Leave a comment and let me know.

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 1

January 7th, 2010

“Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.” — Tim Berners-Lee

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 1

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Video review of Gary Vaynerchuck’s (@garyvee) Crush It!; Jerry P. King’s Mathematics in 10 Lessons: The Grand Tour; Joseph Mazur’s Euclid in the Rainforest; Woopra; and StaticMatic.

2009 Hacker of the Year Award

August 14th, 2009

“I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” — Jack Benny

Trying something a little different with this post, I present to you my picks for the most influential developers of the August 2008-2009 season. I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions on developers which I may have missed that deserve a mention. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the API, stupid

August 4th, 2009

“Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.” — Russell Simmons

My first real language was Pascal. My first few programs were written in Basic, but even then it felt like a toy language. Many of the techniques that I learned from Basic applied directly to Pascal though — control structures like loops, conditional statements, operator precedence and so on. Just like mathematics is built upon fundamental axioms like the Well-ordering principle, programming is built upon these fundamental techniques. They’re constant, they don’t vary from language to language. Read the rest of this entry »

Book Report: Letters To A Young Mathematician

June 23rd, 2009
I’ve been focusing a fair amount of energy lately on sharpening the math skills, so I was intrigued when I stumbled upon this book, Letters To A Young Mathematician by Ian Stewart. Read the rest of this entry »