Natural light, it burns!

I'm convinced that the only time to start a successful start-up (in Toronto, at least) is early summer. Being able to work outside, catching some sun, and going for a run or roller blading in the park when you feel your brain is getting full is amazing.

What's even more amazing is the feeling of clarity and focus, which only gets stronger every day. We shared our ideas early on with some of our friends, and since then the beast has grown and morphed in our minds... but in some indescribable way, it doesn't feel like it's changed (even though it has), it only feels like the details that have always been there are revealing themselves to us, one by one.

Toughest parts so far? Finding a "home run" domain name (I don't expect this to happen for another month or two). And for me (since I put on my project manager hat), finding a good task tracking tool. I went through maybe 30 options, and they were all either too basic, too elaborate, or not free (and not worth the money). In the end I settled on http://www.dotproject.net/, which has the advantage that I could set it up through our webhost's control panel. The interface is somewhat clumsy, but it'll do.

Since I'm the resident geek, I feel like a bit of technical babble is called for. And what better subject to babble about than the many benefits of Rails! (I can see other geek readers rolling their eyes right about now. Yes, you.)

This is nothing new to Rails users, but I always thought the way routing is handled is very neat. A very basic example is something like:

http://www.clutterme.com/pages/show?name=username

which we might want to condense to the much friendlier

http://www.clutterme.com/username

Nothing fancy, all it takes is the following in routes.rb:

map.connect ':name',
:controller => "pages",
:action => "show"

Now, the fun part is more complicated paths:

http://www.clutterme.com/users/account?name=username
http://www.clutterme.com/users/settings?name=username
etc.

would ideally go to:

http://www.clutterme.com/username/account
http://www.clutterme.com/username/settings
etc.

I expected this to be fairly complicated to do on top of the first rule, since I now have a parameter as the first part of the path, sometimes followed by an action, and the controller is inferred from the context. Yikes! Well, it's not all that complicated. All it took is one extra line in routes.rb:

map.connect ':name/:action',
:controller => "users"

The best part? I'm far from a Rails or routes.rb expert; the above code just "made sense", and it just worked. That's how computers are supposed to work.

Day Two

So big progress thus far... we've changed our blog address.


For more visibility and for users being able to leave comments we've switched from hosting our own blog (iWeb) to Blogger.com.

We hope the extra visibility from google and other bloggers will attract some more traffic to our blog.

Today is also one of our founders Birthday. Happy Birthday goes to Alex who turns 25 today. We're going out to celebrate, or at least we bought a cake.



In tech. notes there was and will be some more progress in the overall look of the main page. Perhaps tonight we could start 'adding friends'. Look for updates tonight for those with user accounts.