I’m proud to see that more people are forking and using my little planetoid, a rails application for building small communities online, with feed aggregation. I started building this feed aggregator as we needed a planet for our Spain.rb association of Spanish rubyists, but I wanted to keep in mind that if this was helpful to a group like us, it could help other groups with similar needs.
What does planetoid allow you to do?
Show a summary of the people in a group, with their names, avatars, links to their blogs, twitters and github accounts.
Aggregate their feeds in one place
Show the projects that the members are working on, with title, a brief description, and a link
Who is using planetoid?
I keep a list of the sites that are using planetoid. As of today, these are some of the people using planetoid:
Spain.rb. The Spanish rubyists community devoted to promote our work on the Ruby community, worldwide.
ASPGems. A Spanish Ruby on Rails company, based on Madrid.
Flowers In Space. A Spanish Ruby on Rails company, from Seville.
Just try it, it’s easy to install as a rails application… I’m open for comments and suggestions so if you find it useful but you need a new feature just tell me. And if you use it, send me a note to add your site to the list!
Hace un par de días contraté el servicio de internet móvil por modem 3G (GPRS) de Simyo, la tarifa de 5G al mes que viene con un módem Alcatel HSPA, para poder trabajar este verano desde la playa. En principio se supone que es un módem USB plug-and-play, pero en la práctica tuve algún problemilla para hacerlo funcionar en el macbook. Finalmente, googleando un poco y fijándome en los parámetros de configuración al instalarlo en un ordenador con windows, pude ver qué le faltaba a la instalación en el macbook.
La instalación es sencilla: enchufas el modem USB, y aparece una unidad de disco. Dentro hay un instalador (.PKG), doble clic, instalar y reiniciar la máquina. A partir de ahí basta con lanzar el programa HSPA USB MODEM, te pide el PIN de la tarjeta del módem, lo introduces y en principio pulsarías Conectar y ya está. Pero esto es en Windows, en el macbook está mal hecha la instalación y falta configurar un perfil de conexión.
Para ello clica en el último icono de abajo de abajo a la izquierda y selecciona “Perfil de conexión” en el menú desplegado:
en la siguiente pantalla debes añadir un nuevo perfil de conexión, y después activarlo:
estos son los parámetros de configuración necesarios:
Cuenta: simyo (o cualquier otro nombre, supongo)
Número: *99***1#
APN: gprs-service.com
Y ya está. Lo salvas, recuerda darle al botón “Activar”, y a partir de ahí ya puedes conectar a internet.
A mi me va bastante bien, me llega a 2 Mb, que no está mal para estar en Girona.
Ahora me falta conseguir compartir mi conexión con el macbook de mi chica… se desconecta a los pocos segundos de hacerlo. Si alguien me puede echar una mano con esto, se lo agradezco de antemano!
ACTUALIZACIÓN: sí que se puede compartir la conexión entre macbooks! Debía ser cosa de mi firewall o así. El caso es que ya funciona, 2 macbooks conectándose a la vez con un mismo simyo.
I’ve released today planetoid, a really simple and lightweight planet (feed aggregator) for small communities online.
planetoid will let you create users and feeds from their blogs, which will be parsed automatically and shown on the front page. You can set up a cron job to do this task automatically. planetoid is intentionally simple: I didn’t want to create another multi-user blog engine, I just wanted to put together some blogs and show basic info about the authors, so you won’t find here thinks like user registration or posts publication. You just provide info about the authors and their feeds, that’s all.
planetoid is inspired by Aintablog, which is a great piece of software but didn’t give me what I was exactly needed at the moment.
Code is available through my github repository. Please keep in mind that this is an initial draft, fully working, but on a very initial state (I started writing it yesterday), so use it at your own risk
Feedback will be greatly appreciated so please try it and comment what you like / dislike about it!
Sometimes it looks like Microsoft’s mission in this world is making web developers life miserable. Yes, I’m sure the World will be a better place when this company finally disappears, but it looks like we’ll have to wait for a while for this to happen. For now, we’ll have to follow their absurd rules and adapt our standards-compliant web applications to their own de facto standards.
But this time I’m not talking about Internet Explorer, that stupid and paranoid browser we all hate. I’m talking about Hotmail, that stupid and paranoid mail service we also hate. I really hate it because it makes me lose my time trying to convince them that I’m not a bloody spammer. Look, we’ve only sent a few testing emails from our production server and we’ve already been marked as spammers. This has to be corrected right now, what could happen when we launch the site for good and thousands of mails come out of it and get lost on the spam folders of those Hotmail users? And that if you’re lucky enough to reach the spam folder
OK, I’ve complained enough, I’ve got to live with it. Let’s see some things that you can try to improve your mail sending, how to avoid being marked as spammer by Hotmail.
Stop sharing – if you can
Basically, the problem with mails is that we tend to use shared mail servers for sending e-mail. We might be good guys, but we’re on a shared server, so many other e-mails are being constantly sent from it by the other users and we just can’t control it. Maybe your neighbour is selling viagra, who knows? The thing is, Hotmail will mark the whole mail server as a source of spam, even if you’re not a spammer.
The first tip would be using a dedicated server for sending email. Having a unique IP would help avoid those situations, but this might be overkill and expensive. In our case, we’re hosted on EngineYard, and they provide these tips to improve e-mail deliverability. As they say, they have a solution that lets treat shared servers as trusty dedicated servers:
We’ve crafted a rather neat solution that allows you to utilize our shared mail systems while retaining your own dedicated sending IP. This insulates you (and your sending reputation) from being adversely (or positively) impacted by other clients.
To do this, you need to configure a SPF record on your DNS:
SPF stands for sender policy framework. It’s basically a DNS record that MTAs can use to verify that a given host is allowed to send mail for your domain.
It will depend on your domain control panel how to do this.
Microsoft Sender ID
Once this SPF record is set up on your DNS, you need to tell Hotmail this has been set up. You’ve got information about the Sender ID framework, but basically you need to submit your SPF record to them.
That’s a first step in order to clean your reputation in front of Hotmail. In one or two days you should receive response on your e-mail. In my case, they told me that they had added this SPF record to their systems, and that in 48 hours or so the changes would be propagated and I’d no longer be treated as a criminal.
2 days later, things were much better. Most emails sent from our server to Hotmail reached the inboxes! We were happy for a few days, but after that, some Hotmail users told us they still were getting our emails on their spam folders or, even they just didn’t get any message at all.
Ask Microsoft directly
So, I contacted directly Microsoft by replying to the email they sent me telling everything was OK. I showed them some of the Hotmail addresses that were still thinking we were spammers. One day later, they replied back. Quick! Basically they were saying:
Your IP was blocked by Windows Live Hotmail because the majority of all the email that you send to Hotmail has been judged to be spam by Windows Live Hotmail’s internal filtering system. We have conducted an investigation into the emails originating from your IP space and we have implemented a fix for your deliverability problem. This fix may take up to 48 hours to replicate completely throughout our system
So well, it looks like the SPF submission wasn’t enough. And they say they’ve applied a “fix”, I guess they’ll be filtering out our domain or something. Anyway, they also provided links with more info and burocracy I could try to convince them of our innocence. After reading this I went to their Sender solutions section. There, I was interested on the Sender ID program (that I tried before), the Sender Score Certified Email, that looked very promising but you cannot apply to if you haven’t got a dedicated IP, the Smart Network Data Services, which you can’t control if you’re not the owner of the server (I’ll tell EngineYard to do this for me), and the Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program, which I joined. And finally I even found another form you could submit, but also needed data from the owner of the server so I’ll contact EngineYard for this.
The Final Solution
So, that’s all for now. No, there is no final solution. I’m still waiting to see if all these things help us improve our situation with Hotmail. If I learn something new, I’ll tell you here – if you have suggestions, they’re all welcome!
So, there it is, we’ve done it, EuRuKo 2009 is over!
It has been a really pleasing experience for all of us on the organization team, we’ve had a really, really good time sharing ideas and code to organize the main european Ruby conference. I have to admit it, we were really surprised to see Spain was proposed as the candidate country last year in Prague. The czech team proposed Madrid as the candidate city to the group of spaniards that were there, and we were excited to hear it. We eventually changed it to Barcelona instead, as Madrid was already quite full holding the Conferencia Rails (that’s the Spanish Rails Conference that is held every November and organized by ourselves by the way: it’s amazing as well )
So to set this up many things were made during this year: a new association was born, the SRUG (Spanish Ruby Users Group), which has been the organization in charge of the conference. We built a rails app to handle the registration process, talks listing and calendar, paypal payments and more – it was built over a simple app I did for the Conferencia Rails and made much bigger by Fernando Guillén, Juanjo Bazán and Raúl Murciano. The code of this app is freely available on github for use in other conferences, please fork us! We also received the help of the Scotland on Rails team, who sent us a pair of ruby scripts to build the EuRuKo twitter bot and the raffle. Thanks guys!
We even bought a gong for the lightning talks that will be passed from team to team during the next years conferences and will be a symbol for our descendants on the next centuries.
Now it’s time to pass the gong to the next country and start it over again for EuRuKo 2010. I hope they find as much fun as we did during 2009! See you next spring in Krakow!
Atención todo el mundo! La Conferencia de Ruby Europea por antonomasia, EuRuKo, abrirá sus puertas en breve.
Desde el equipo de organización del evento ya tenemos casi lista la aplicación de registro, y está previsto abrirla en estos días, en cuanto ultimemos unos detallitos.
Hemos ido recibiendo un buen montón de propuestas de charlas interesantes, pero aún queremos más! Si sabes de Ruby y te gustaría participar, aún estás a tiempo de enviar tu propuesta de charla a talks@euruko2009.org
Y si eres diseñador, ¿te animas a participar en el concurso de camisetas?
Take a look at this screencast about the acts_like_a_forest plugin that will make you much happier and productive, with a clear and relaxed mind
Sometimes what your code needs is a relaxed approach into the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re stuck, leave it for a while and go for a walk in the woods. Your subconscious will find the solution for you.
La Euruko 2009 va tomando forma! Acabamos de abrir el plazo de call for papers, así que si controlas Ruby y te gustaría dar una charla (en inglés), envíanos tu propuesta!
OK, ya estamos en 2009, y es un buen momento para pensar qué he hecho durante el 2008 antes de comenzar los nuevos proyectos de este año.
Proyectos para clientes
2008 ha sido un año interesante, lleno de proyectos:
IKEA: El Hogar De…
elhogar.de
En 2008 formé parte del equipo de desarrollo de Profesionalia para la nueva red social de IKEA “El Hogar De”, en la que los usuarios suben las fotos de sus casas, cuentan sus aventuras, charlan en foros y mucho más…
El estudio del diseñador de lámparas gallego Arturo Álvarez crea algunas de las lámparas más raras y bellas que he visto en mi vida. Este proyecto comenzó como un gestor de contenidos que tenía en mente todos los detalles, hasta el tipo de bombilla utilizada por cada modelo de lámpara, pero el proyecto fué cambiando sobre la marcha y se convirtió en algo mucho más sencillo, una especie de gestor de contenidos orientado a subir imágenes. Y es que una imagen vale más que 1000 palabras.
¿Eres creativo? ¿Tienes un portfolio interesante? Entonces únete a la red de Ameets, una red social orientada a creativos que está creciendo a pasos agigantados.
Este invierno no ha podido ser más interesante para mi carrera! Me encanta la música, y me gusta tocar temas de rock con la guitarra, así que estoy super contento de haberme unido a este nuevo proyecto desde el comienzo. Por el momento no os puedo contar más detalles, pero dentro de poco podrás probar la beta pública!
Proyectos personales
Hey, aún me queda tiempo para hacer un poco de programación nocturna!
Mi proyecto mascota desde que comencé con Ruby on Rails allá por el 2006, es un servicio gratuito que te permite rastrear los cambios de Google PageRank en tus webs.
El lugar donde vivo está rodeado de naturaleza. Me encanta dar largos paseos por los bosques y hacer fotos de la flora local, al igual que a mis compañeros de proyecto. Hemos construído este sitio para almacenar y clasificar fotos de plantas.
Reuniones y conferencias de Ruby on Rails
Me encanta pertenecer a las comunidades ruby / rails, entre otras cosas porque mola viajar a otras ciudades y conocer gente interesante. En 2008 estuve en dos grandes eventos relacionados con Ruby:
* Euruko 2008 en Praga (Marzo). Allí, se propuso a España como el país anfitrión para Euruko 2009, así que tomamos el relevo, montamos la asociación SRUG, y ahora estoy en el equipo organizador de la próxima Euruko! Nos vemos en Barcelona!
* Conferencia Rails en Madrid (Noviembre).
Este año fué la tercera edición de la conferencia rails hispana, y por tercer año consecutivo formé parte del equipo organizador.
Vida personal
Durante 2008 también he disfrutado de mi vida offline un montón. He consolidado mi nueva vida en Cataluña. He hecho nuevas amistades, aprendido un nuevo idioma y hasta aprendido nuevas recetas!
(algunos de) Mis objetivos para 2009
* Comer menos, y mejor! Comida de verdad, de cultivo biológico, sin pesticidas! * Dormir más, y mejor! Más Siesta-Driven Development! * Trabajar menos! Menos horas, y automatizar las tareas aburridas. * Estudiar más! Al menos, la 1/3 parte de mi tiempo de trabajo debería estar dedicado a estudiar nuevas técnicas y mejorar mis habilidades. * Ganar más dinero! Sí! * Divertirme más! Reirme un montón, descubrir cosas nuevas, pasear por el bosque
Dabne-Tecnologías de la Información es una empresa especializada en consultoría e implementación de proyectos con software libre, tales como el diseño y la implementación de bibliotecas y archivos digitales, la de integración de tecnologías en ámbitos educativos o el desarrollo de aplicaciones web.
…pero además, Dabne son mis amigas Carolina, Amaia y Marga, con las que he tenido el gusto de trabajar ya en un par de proyectos grandotes.
Ahora, Dabne quiere crecer y buscan una persona que se quiera incoporar a la cooperativa. Así que si te interesa el software libre y el desarrollo web, pásate a verlas.
So, there it is, we’ve done it, 
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