I presented Zippy Stat at MinneDemo on Friday night and wanted to share a little about the experience.

Zippy Stat is a project I’ve been working on to record, monitor and share “Micro-Statistics” in your life. Things such as miles you’ve run, business cards collected at an event, business auto mileage and really anything else you can think up. It came about because there were a bunch of these little stats that I wanted to record for :coderow and didn’t want 30 different spreadsheets or 30 different apps to manage them. Furthermore, as a rabid developer, I’m always looking for another fun application to build.

» Continue reading “Zippy Stat at MinneDemo”

Up until recently I’ve hosted all of my hobby/small Rails sites at Textdrive. It was inexpensive, the documentation fairly thorough, and support was responsive. About a month ago, I started putting together another small Rails site. I built it locally and was ready to deploy to my server at TextDrive. However, the server had an old version of RubyGems, and I found out that wouldn’t be upgraded. My plan was being outmoded, and needed to upgrade my plan (aka, spend more) and move my code.

I really wasn’t in the mood to do this, and so I took the opportunity to look into some of the other services getting a lot of press lately: Namely the “managed” cloud services–those apps that use EC2 or other elastic services, but put a nice front end on more easily manage deployments. The following are some first impressions on each of the services I worked with:

» Continue reading “working in the clouds”