Say hello to Pacecar:
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Pacecar is an online reading tool, designed to help you read faster and with more focus. It masks the distracting elements on the page, giving you a reading window that follows your mouse.
If you’ve ever read a book on speed-reading, you know one of the main techniques is to use a pacer, […]
MissingMethod is the weblog of Bruno Bornsztein, a Ruby on Rails developer and entrepreneur based in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Currently working on:
Curbly.com - a DIY Design Community
Uncooped.com - Outdoor Adventure Network
Contact: admin@curbly.com
Here’s a new site I’m working on that helps tennis players connect and form hyper-local comunities:
Unsurprisingly, it’s built on top of CommunityEngine, but with a lot of tennis-specific features added on. At the moment, it’s focused on tennis courts and players in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area (Minneapolis & St. Paul).
With TennisMetro, players can subscribe to their favorite local courts, and meet other people who play there. I’m an avid tennis player myself, and I was frustrated because I knew there were loads of good players at my local court, but I had no good way of connecting with them.
You’ll probably hear more from me on this next spring, when tennis season gears up again, but for now, check out the site and let me know if you have any feedback (esp. Twin Cities people).
Well, I wanted to learn how to write a Facebook application, so I though Teacherly’s wordsearch creator would be a fun one to port. Check out Wordsearchtastic! on Facebook; it runs on the same codebase as Teacherly (using CommunityEngine, of course, was a cinch).
Wordsearchtastic makes it fun and easy to create wordsearch puzzles on Facebook, share them with your friends and see who can finish them fastest. Enjoy!
I’m happy to introduce a tool that makes installing and deploying CommunityEngine much easier. It’s called CommunityEngine-Setup:
http://github.com/bborn/communityengine-setup/tree/master
Along with the new CommunityEngineServer Amazon EC2 ami I’m making available (ami-cbc226a2), CommunityEngine-setup makes it super easy to get started using CE.
The CommunityEngineServer ami is a server image with all the CE requirements baked in (including rmagick, which always seems to be a pain to install). Then, you can use CE-Setup to get a fully functioning CE application installed on your server, complete with a git repository and working deploy scripts.
Enjoy! (And remember, this is an early release, so please let me know if you find bugs)
Just wanted to announce that I’ve thrown up a corporate site for Curbly, LLC (the company behind Curbly, WeeBabyStuff, and all the other sites I talk about on this blog). I figured it made sense to tie all of my various endeavours up in one place, so, here it is!
That is all. Move along.
Just another example of how fast and flexible CommunityEngine is: www.weebabystuff.com took under 16 hours to build, from “rails weebabystuff” to “cap deploy”.
The site is a group blog/community focused on baby products, accessories and DIY projects.
Using CommunityEngine is a huge short-cut, and makes the cost of launching a new site minimal. And since it’s a plugin, not a self-contained application like Insoshi or Lovdbyless, I don’t have to wory about keeping my customized social network synced with the main repository; my local changes are isolated from the core code, so getting the newest version of CE into my app is as easy as “git pull”.