Matt Collins

Category: Technology

  • Google +1 Recommendations Rolling Out to All Users Today

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    Matt Collins
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    According to an email I’ve just received from Google, they are today rolling out Google +1 Recommendations to all users. When you hover over a +1 button, you may now see a popup showing other pages on the site that your friends have recommended via +1. My account has been in the beta test for…

  • Comparing Payment Gateways and Merchant Accounts

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    Matt Collins
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    Working out how to accept payments online is a pain. What do you need, exactly? Which payment gateway should you choose? How much will it cost? I’ve set up a few online businesses now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of it all, but I remember how confusing all this payments stuff…

  • How to Speed Up Web Development Using a PSD to HTML Service

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    Matt Collins
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    Could you be saving yourself time and money with a PSD to HTML service? PSD to HTML services allow you to send in the design for a web page as a PSD file (the kind of thing your web designer will create in Photoshop) and give you back a set of HTML and CSS files…

  • How to Choose an E-Commerce Shopping Cart

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    Matt Collins
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    I recently spent some time comparing current e-commerce platforms (a.k.a. shopping carts). It’s a complicated area, so I thought I’d share my findings here in case they can be useful to others. These are my opinions and analysis based on my own research and experimentation and are biased towards sites targeting a UK market. First…

  • Best practice RESTful queries in Rails

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    Matt Collins
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    photo credit: alexanderdrachmann I was recently helping a friend out with his Rails project and we were trying to figure out the best way to handle queries in a RESTful Rails app, i.e. returning a subset of items meeting certain conditions. After a bit of poking around, here’s what looks like the most promising convention…

  • Outside.in switches to Rails

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    Matt Collins
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    Here’s a post about Outside.in recently switching from PHP to Rails. Interestingly, they cite access to GIS functionality as one reason for the switch. After the switch, their hosting costs were roughly the same as before and their codebase was down to just 20% of its former size!

  • Fix for “Couldn’t find ‘authenticated’ generator”

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    Matt Collins
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    Here’s another little problem I was just hitting and the solution in case it happens to help someone else out there. If you’re trying to use a plugin (in this case the restful_authentication plugin) and you’re hitting an error like this when you use ./script/generate: “Couldn’t find ‘authenticated’ generator” Check to make sure that you…

  • RESTful Rails

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    Matt Collins
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    Today I decided to get my head around REST and, more specifically, whether and how I should use it in my Rails development projects. REST (or REpresentational State Transfer – see Wikipedia), is all about resources. As I understand it, in a perfectly RESTful application, every object is resource with a unique identifier (in this…

  • How to add nofollow to links in Rails

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    Matt Collins
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    It’s really very simple, but this one took me a while to figure out, so I thought I’d post it in case it helps someone else. If you want to add a rel='nofollow' attribute to a link generated with a Rails helper, you just need to specify it in the html_options hash argument to link_to…

  • Back online

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    Matt Collins
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    Right, 67 minutes after I reported that I’d fixed the problem, my sites were back online.In total my sites were down for 5 hours. Here’s a rough breakdown of where the time went: 2.5 hours before I saw email telling me my site had been taken down 1 hour to be allowed access to server…