occasionally useful ruby, ubuntu, etc

23Jan/1020

A brief introduction to Ruby, Sinatra, and Haml

Ruby and Sinatra make it ludicrously easy to make a webapp, but getting started, as with any new language or framework, can be daunting. By the end of this part, you'll have a simple template that talks back to you!

7Nov/093

Cool free hosted tools for your Ruby webapp

Some of these are obvious (i.e. get exceptional, hoptoad), many of these aren't Ruby-specific, but I thought it might be nice to put all these in one place, at least for my sake.

Exception tracking

Get Exceptional limit: 1 app
Hoptoad limit: 1 project, 2 users

Bug tracking:

there's github, of course, if you're already using that...
16bugs limit: 1 project
I'm not including full hosting platforms, like Google Code here, but you could use those, too

Email

One-off emails (i.e. signup)

Sendgrid limit: 200 emails/day
GMail allows 500 emails/day, but doesn't offer all the doodads that Sendgrid does

Mailing list (i.e. newsletter)

Mailchimp limit: 500 subscribers, 3000 emails total a month

Customer Support

SnapABug limit: 10 reports/day
uservoice limit: 100 unique users/month
GetSatisfaction limit: 0 official reps, not hosted on your url

Analytics

There's a ton of options in this space, but I use:
Google Analytics limit: no limits, because it's The Goog
Clicky limit: 1 website, 3000 hits/day

Metrics, Monitoring

New Relic limit: no troubleshooting, optimization, etc
Tripwire (Alpha, no immediate signup) for tracking validation errors.  limits not specified

User Avatar Hosting

Gravatar limit: none

Authentication

OpenID

RPX limit: up to 6 providers, instead of 12

Time tracking/invoicing

Harvest limit: 2 projects, 4 clients, 1 user

Help desk thing

Just kidding, couldn't find any free hosted help desk apps

Anything else I'm missing that every webapp needs?

Update 10/5/2010: added Tripwire

Filed under: ruby, webapp 3 Comments