Cobalt Edge

I've been extremely busy with DealBase work, so have lagged on blogging, but have some interesting things coming up and hope to post more soon. Recently I added RSS feeds to all of the city/destination and hotel pages on DealBase. This is just one more way for you to keep up to date with all the deals we add to the system. Our other primary way, aside from browsing the site of course, is to sign up for personalized alert emails. This lets you follow one or more cities, and set criteria like class of hotel (i.e. you only want to see 4 and 5 star hotels), maximum price, and so on. You can set a schedule for how often you want the emails (once a week, twice a week, daily, etc.). We'll send you up to the best 10 deals that match your criteria. You can also simply subscribe by just supplying your email address and nothing else and we'll set your initial preferences for our top 10 destinations. We'll continue to enhance this alert service, and I'd love to hear any suggestions people have for additions, changes, etc.

Development of the alert emails has been interesting. One of the most useful tools throughout has been Litmus' email testing service. It's pretty slick. They cover quite an array of email clients, both web hosted (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), as well as desktop (Outlook, Apple Mail, Notes, etc.). They also do spam testing. When you begin a test, they supply you an email address specific for that particular test run, and then you just email them the real email you want tested. You can also paste in an email, but I prefer to do the sending approach to as closely mimic the real thing as possible. I have my IRB and various other bits configured to make it a single command to fire off test cases to a Litmus supplied email address, and the whole process works great, and is truly worth Litmus' cost.

I started off mentioning RSS, and back to that... The RSS does work differently than the email alerts (obviously), and to some degree the web page. It is like selecting the "Most Recently Posted" sort on a page (see below image). Deals are supplied to the RSS feed as they're posted, just like a blog would do. Just one more way to stay on top of deals. Oh, and don't forget we're on Twitter too.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Loading mentions Retweet

At DealBase, we have an opening for a part-time front end Rails developer at DealBase.com. The opening is for US residents only, and for individuals, no agencies or recruiters please. Most likely you'd be working remotely/telecommuting. The job posting, which is posted in several places, such as Rubynow, Working With Rails, and Rubyjobs.in, covers all the details, but I'll relist it here for ease:

I'm excited to find a great developer to work with. DealBase has been an awesome company and app to work on, and we're already experiencing great success. We have some pretty cool features planned, and it'd be ideal to get some real CSS and JavaScript ninja skills making those features even better. So, if this is you, please do get in touch, making sure to send email to the right email address as outlined in the job description.

Loading mentions Retweet

Today I finally bit the bullet and renamed the DealBase GitHub account and repository because it was previously named after an early incarnation of the business name (before we'd actually decided on a name). I had expected this to be a bit tedious. In particular, I had started the original repository under my own GitHub account, and then forked it into the company account. Being a private repo, you can't delete the original repository without it deleting any forks (and back in the day ;-) you couldn't even delete repos on GitHub). But, as it turned out, it was pretty easy and didn't take long or involve that much fixing or things that use the code base.

I did ask the GitHub folks for some tips, so these steps factor that info in. Also, before you do any of this, you should of course heed the typical disclaimers, make backups, etc. That said, first, rename the account. You can do this in your Account page on GitHub. Look at the bottom of your account page for this:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

You don't even need to re-clone your repo for this. Once you've done the rename, you can simply edit your local .git/config file to fix up the account name. Do this anywhere you have cloned the repo - for example on your continuous integration server, deployment scripts, cached copies of code on your staging and deployment servers, Tracker-GitHub post-receive hook service, etc.

Now on to renaming a private forked repo. If you just need to rename a repo, you can do that on the Edit page for a repository and then repeat the above steps:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

But, if you have forked a private repo, it's slightly more involved, but don't fear!

1. First, make sure you (and anyone else working on the project) have no work in progress, or that you somehow save off that work outside of the repo.


2. Do a pull from GitHub so you have the most up to date codebase.


3. On GitHub, delete the original repository (not your forked copy, but from the location you forked it from). This will cascade and delete your forked copy as well. You'll find this right below where you can rename it on the repo's Edit page:
   
   

   
   Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!


4. Optionally rename the directory, on your local machine, of the codebase/repo.


5. Now create a new repository, with your new choice of name, on GitHub.


6. Then, follow the instructions to import an existing repository. In doing so, on your local machine, go into your codebase, and use that. This will preserve the full Git history and everything from the repository, pushing it up to GitHub just as it was before, but under the new name and rooted at the [new] account.


7. Fix up all things that use the GitHub account, as mentioned above, like CI servers, deployment scripts, and so on.

That's it, you're done. Pretty straight forward and shouldn't take much time. Thanks again to GitHub for making life so much better in source control land!

Loading mentions Retweet

I too read Al3x's interview the other day, and like John Nunemaker, figured I'd share my setup, as I enjoy reading what others use and often can pick up a few interesting tools or tidbits.

Unlike Mr. Nunemaker, my desk is too messy, IMHO, to photograph right now :) However, many similarities aside from that. On with it...

I use a 17" MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM as my only machine these days. Like Alex and John, I really like having just a single machine, and I no longer work for a corporation where I'd worry about that. DealBase is cool and wouldn't try to make some wacko claim to some work not relevant (and we've explicitly discussed my use of a single machine, etc.). I have my MBP open on a laptop arm from Ergotron, and then my primary monitor is a 30" Dell. Really love the big monitor. I do my main work o the 30", and then the laptop screen has TweetDeck, iChat, Things, some Fluid apps, and other things that I tend to more glance at, and aren't primary work items.

Further, I use a wireless Apple keyboard, and like John, I just love this thing. I can't tell you how long I'd been looking for a keyboard that was just a keyboard (but with arrow keys). I hate normal keyboards that take up so much extra space on the right side (my mouse side) with stuff I rarely use - which only exacerbates problems with having my arm/elbow canitlevered further out to use the mouse, sometimes causing arm strain after long days of coding. I use Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse, which I like quite a lot.

Transitioning to music... I use JBL Creature speakers, and listen to a variety of things, or nothing. Pandora, via a Fluid app, iTunes (my own playlists, or various Ambient "radio" stations), etc. Either that, or we have a whole-house NuVo Concerto audio system, so sometimes I have that on either with XM satellite radio, or to a playlist from the iPod we have hooked into it. The NuVo setup is nice because it fills my office with sound a bit better (via in-ceiling speakers), but I have more variety via the computer.

As with Alex and John, I am absolutely in love with my iPhone 3G. It is even better than expected. It has essentially replaced my 80GB iPod in the car, typically because it's more up to date, and I like it's UI better; I can remotely work on servers if I have to via iSSH, play games if I'm bored, use InstaPaper to read things I've set for reading later, sync with Address Book and iCal, and of course Twitter, via Tweetie. So, yes, I use Apple's Address Book and iCal, for great sync, simplicity, etc.

Ok, onto dev stuff. My primary work is on Rails-based web-apps, although I dabble with other things as well. DealBase is my day job, and I'm also involved with Bring Light.

Yet again, like Alex and John, I spend the bulk of my time in TextMate, iTerm (a better Terminal, IMHO), and Safari. And actually, I do my development testing in nightly builds of WebKit/Safari, and all my other browsing in standard Safari. I do pull up Firefox for testing, and to use YSlow and sometimes Firebug (although I've been finding the dev tools in WebKit nightlies work well). I've used Emacs - did so for about a year when working with Linux as my desktop. I ditched it back then in favor of Visual SlickEdit, but these days TextMate just rules. I don't get the Emacs passion - why do you want to press two keys for everything, especially the most common things? Yes, I know, you can setup different bindings, etc., but come on the most basic things like saving, opening, copy, paste, etc. should be "single" key (and by single I mean some meta+key) strokes by default. I do fire up vi all the time at the command line on remote servers, and even occasionally on my MBP for some real quick edit. Also, I spend the bulk of my day in my text editor, so yes, appearance matters, and TextMate kills others. I've also used a lot of IDE's in the past, from IDEA, to Eclipse, to Visual Studio. Visual Studio is actually quite good if you have to suffer in that world, but I find Eclipse just plain crappy. IDEA was great for Java, and their Ruby setup will be something to keep an eye on, but generally, the setup I have now works well.

I have all my code for nearly everything I do (e.g. both private and open source/public) on GitHub, and truly love it. Git has been a huge win, and gives me the best of, as well as improving SVN and Perforce. I'm using GitX for most of my commits and history browsing these days.

I use RSpactor for continuously running our RSpec suite, and we also use RSpec stories (but haven't converted to Cucumber yet). I recently added speech output to RSpactor, and that is my preferred notification instead of Growl. We use Pivotal Tracker for tasks/stories/features as well as bug tracking. We used to use Lighthouse, but having it all in one place was nicer, and Tracker wins big time in my opinion. If you want GitHub post-receive hook for Tracker, I recently whipped that up, and its been a real nice addition. We too use Hoptoad for exception notification, and really like it. Also, New Relic is in use at DealBase. I also like viewing Google Analytics with Analytics Reporting Suite, a slick AIR app.

I really like Navicat as a GUI for database stuff. It's proprietary/pay software, but honestly, it's worth it to me. I can do all this stuff command line fine, but the GUI simply makes it a heck of a lot faster to view the results, quickly re-sort on a column, mess around with queries, etc. Also, it has great SSH support, so I can tunnel into all my server's DB's with ease.

I have CruiseControl.rb setups for all my Rails apps, and make use of CCMenu for a nice little status menu item showing me what's going on with those.

I pretty much can't live without LaunchBar. Same goes for 1Password.

Skitch is quite handy for showing sharing and annotating screen shots, and we use Google Docs and Gmail. Speaking of email, I am a huge fan of Mailplane, which is a Mac app for Gmail. Integration is superb, and I can quickly switch around my 15 or so Gmail accounts with ease. I find it superior to a Fluid app for Gmail, since the integration is better and it handles multiple accounts.

I host most of my own web apps on Slicehost, and DealBase is at EngineYard.

I also use Backpack some, although not nearly as much as I used to, and access it about 99% of the time via Packrat. MarsEdit is my blog authoring tool of choice. NetNewsWire is my RSS reader.

All of my photography and photo processing, etc. are done in Adobe Lightroom. I use the Flickr plugin for it as well.

Various other bits:

• TextPander


• WeatherDock


• Pukka


• Flickr


• Del.icio.us


• xScope - a great screen ruler app


• Photoshop CS3 (look for my name in the about box too :)


• JungleDisk - I do some backups with this


• SuperDuper! Still my favorite backup, although I use TimeMachine too


• CSS Edit and XyleScope sometimes


• Last.fm - is running all the time, but I really don't actually make use of it, kinda silly.


• Acrobat Pro and Reader


• XCode (or TextMate) if I'm working on an Objective-C/Cocoa app.


• iStat menus


• YouControl Tunes




p.s. One other bit I can't live without but really isn't computing hardware/software, is my espresso setup. I use an Expobar Brewtus II machine, Macap MC4 stepless doserless grinder and a variety of cups (mostly Nuova Pointe and Illy). I use only totally fresh beans from a variety of places (favorites include Blue Bottle, Ecco Caffe, PT's, 49th Parallel (unfortunately not often, since shipping from Canada makes it a bit cost prohibitive), etc.). Coffelab tamper and Bumper stand and knock box. My espresso bar is kept clean (unlike my desk). The pictures are a bit older, so don't show bottomless portafilter in use these days.

Whew, that's more than plenty. What's your setup?




Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   ContinuousIntegration   CruiseControl   DealBase   environment   Espresso   git   Gmail   iPhone   laptop   Mac   Nuvo   Office   Pivotal Tracker   Rails   RSpactor   Ruby   TextMate  

Over the last couple weeks, we've built some cool new features on DealBase.com. Three in particular...

Interesting Deals Pages

This is fairly simple, but one of my favorites. There is a list of these pages on the home page in the right hand column, under "Interesting Deals". You can find the cheapest deals, the best deals at 5 star hotels, and so on. But, my favorite to check out is the Most Expensive Deals page. This is where we list the most expensive hotel packages, and you can get a glimpse of what the uber-rich might plunk down for. Deals currently as as much as $110,000/night, yes per night. But go take a look and check out what those deals include. Things like private jet for transportation, $40,000 in jewelry, and so on. Oh, how about it includes a trip to Russia, and you know, to make it extra cute, a "Presidential Puppy"! Crazy.

This page is just a lot of fun to explore and see what some of the hotel's come up with.

DealRank™

DealRank™ is our new way of ranking deals to show you the best value. This is an algorithmic/mathematical determination based on various criteria for deals. It factors in the nightly rate, percentage savings, and various other aspects. We expect this to be one of the best ways to sort deals and help you evaluate what is truly a great deal. Each person looking at hotels has different reasons and criteria for evaluating deals. Some want the absolutely best price, some want the best overall value, some are looking to get the biggest savings, or the most extras thrown in, and so on. DealRank™ should help provide a more holistic view on this. We've done a lot of testing and tweaking here, and will continue to do so as the site evolves, but I am pretty darn happy with the results so far. We still have many other ways to sort deals (see the sort menu in the upper right of any deal listing page), but this is our new default.

Check this out on say the New York City hotel deals page, where previously the most economical deals didn't always rise to the top (percentage savings wise, NYC tends to have the best deals at more expensive hotels).

Similar and Nearby Hotels and Deals

Another quite useful feature is the list of similar and nearby hotels or deals (depends on the what kind of page you're on) listing at the bottom of some pages. This factors in various criteria, but one thing for sure is that all of the listed hotels/deals are always within a 50 mile radius. I personally used this when looking for deals on a trip I took the other weekend.

An example is similar and nearby hotels on, one of my favorites, the W hotel in Seattle. Amazon put me up in this hotel. If you've never stayed at a W, they're pretty cool. While working for Adobe for many years, I stayed at the Fairmont Seattle a ton, and you'll see that listed as the second hotel in the list of nearby hotels. But, the W is more edgy, they tend to have cool bars, upscale, swank rooms, etc. Seattle is a favorite place of mine to travel to.

I'm working on a particularly cool feature right now, that I can't wait to get out there. Will take a bit longer as we want to get the UI right and make it of utmost use, but I think it will be something of great value to everyone. Stay tuned.

Loading mentions Retweet

Sam Shank, the CEO of DealBase, the hotel deals site I work on, unveiled the site officially at PhoCusWright 2008. The video of his presentation (as well as all the others) is now available. Go here, and then if you hover your mouse over the video you'll see a slide/icon for each company that presented along the top - scroll to the right until you find DealBase, and then click it to watch. Presentation is about 5 minutes, and is nearly all demo and discussion of our advantages, strengths, how the site works, and business model aspects, etc.

I think the demo went great, and I've continued to hear tons of praise and useful feedback. The demo was completely live, no smoke-and-mirrors; Sam was not kidding when he told the audience to go check out the deal he just posted during the demo.

We somehow (I'm truly surprised, but of course I am a bit biased) didn't get picked as a top 6 for the show, but for example, others disagreed as well. Tim Hughes, author of The Business of Online Travel blog, listed DealBase.com in his Top Six pick of 2008 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit finalists. Regardless, interest has been outstanding, and we're really excited. We're still cranking away with new features, and various other improvements. It's a lot of fun!

Loading mentions Retweet

Since doing our initial public access to the DealBase.com site, you know, the web site that has the most hotel deals on the web (50x more than anyone else), we've been working hard on improving the experience for users. Today we rolled out the latest major revision to the site, which includes some pretty cool stuff. First, let me list these things out, and then I'll cover a few interesting technical bits that occurred along the way.

• New home page: yes, a brand new, much nicer home page. This really helps tell you what's great about the site. It also has a new search box that I call the "omniscient search" - a single search field that auto-completes on our deal locations and hotels, which is much nicer than the separate search boxes we had before. This same search box is also used everywhere else on the site.


• Deal filtering: this was a big one. Seems fairly simple on first blush, but lots of interesting stuff going on in the background. You can now filter deals on any deal listing page, by various criteria. You can combine filters too. So, for example, you can narrow down the deal listing by dates, prices, and hotel ratings, allowing you to, for example, look for 4 star hotel deals valid from April through August of 2009, in a certain price range, for a given city. Very handy. Here, take a look at the deals for Hawaii page as an example.


• Deal sorting: in addition to the filtering, you can now sort the deal listing a myriad of ways, from most percent savings or most dollar savings to high or low rates, or most recently posted, etc. Combining this with filters allows you to really narrow down what deals are best for you.


• Various UI/visual improvements. Meagan, our talented designer, has done a lot of work here.


• Speed improvements. Various database queries and other operations for the site have been sped up, sometimes in small amounts, sometimes in extremely drastic ways.


• More deals: we should probably have about 10,000 deals on the site by the time you read this. This is very exciting for us, and shows how serious we are. These are all very real deals, no link bait, no BS. These are true deals, checked by our team of editors. This gives us about 50x more deals than any other hotel deals site.


• Comments! You can now comment on deals. No login required (just like the rest of the site). Comments do get reviewed, and we'll be watching for spam and so forth, but this is a great way to tell other people about a good deal or a hotel you like, etc. Comment box is at the bottom of a deal's page. For example, check out this wild personal fireworks show deal at the Ritz-Carlton in New York.


• Chrome browser support. DealBase works and looks great in Chrome.

• We're running Rails 2.1.2, which is the latest release of Rails as of this writing. We try to stay up to date regardless, but this was a key release, as it fixed some tricky ActiveRecord named_scope issues when using SQL JOINs. Our filtering and other work requires various JOINs and the fixes here prevented us from having to explicitly hand craft a bunch of queries. Thanks Rails team.


• My current favorite gem is Ryan Bates' scope-builder. This is just so nice for building up big, conditionally chainged named_scopes. As you can imagine this is heavily used in building up combined filtering and sorting of deals.


• More jQuery goodness. I continue to love jQuery, and use it extensively. It is used heavily in the filtering features, pulling in some nice slider UI elements, and also using it for the "updating" status and dimming effects when the AJAX filtering operations are running.


• One issue we ran into with Chrome was using the :cache feature of Rails' javascript_include_tag. If we used this to combine and create a cache file of a bunch of separate JavaScript files, Chrome failed to properly load/parse the resulting JavaScript file. This broke pretty much everything JavaScript wise in Chrome, but the simple fix was to not use :cache to achieve this.


• As a helpful, and economical testing tool, we've been using CrossBrowserTesting.com to give us VM's of a slew of different OS and browser combinations. I tend to run VMWare Fusion and do a lot that way, but it's also a pain to keep up a bunch of different VM images, or have to fire that up for a quick test, etc. We're also using BrowserCam.


• Finally, another shout-out to the Hoptoad service/folks. This continues to be an outstanding service for us. It works really really well, and it's free, so to me it is the winner amongst the competitors.


• We've done a fair number of modifications to our tagging plugin (acts_as_taggable_on_steroids), although they're all particular to our app, so not sure if any will get contributed back. Things like enforcing all our rules about tag naming and so on. The same goes for the will_paginate plugin. But in this case, I'm hoping to contribute these back as soon as I can properly contribute the patches and ensure they'll work in any app.

Loading mentions Retweet

The startup I work for, DealBase, is in need of another developer. This is pretty exciting for us, and the business is quite exciting as well! We're looking for someone with Rails experience, as well as MySQL, Git, TDD (BDD is good too), agile development practices, and so on. You can read all the details in our posting on the 37signals Gig Board. Please make sure you respond to the ad, as opposed to sending me email (or asking via a blog comment). You can mention in your email though that you found it via my blog entry.

One thing I want to specifically note, you don't have to be a "Rock Star"! Sure, we want the best people, but I too am sick of this "Rock Star" designation. I'd like to see someone who's passionate about software development, web apps, technology, TDD, JavaScript, and so on.

Another thing to note, we're a partially distributed team. I myself live in Eugene, Oregon, others are in the Bay area, one person Boston.

Loading mentions Retweet