A recent challenge I faced while working on our product was a requirement that surfaced from a potential client who asked that they be able to use our web-based application as-is, but host their own data internally (in other words, run their own database separate from the one all of our other clients share).
My initial thought was to set-up a second sub-domain (lets call it www2.myapp.com) pointing to our rails application and add a “before_filter” to the ApplicationController that could detect which request.host was being used, and connect to the …

I can’t help but comment on the Tom McCoy article on Interaction Design being a dead-end job.
Interaction Design is certainly no more weak a profession than Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Photography, or any other creative profession. Any single individual could take it upon him or herself to circumvent using a professional and do the work on his or her own using off-the-shelf tools, hacks or just *winging it*.
Frankly I think his blog post is shameless FUD used to gain “link” attention… and Cooper should know better.
I believe all professions evolve …

As one of my rails projects has finally gone to production, one of the more important things I needed consider was how to properly monitor user activity in my application.
Beyond tracking things via google analytics, I wanted to establish some custom log files (beyond spitting everything out into production.log). My first goal: track users that are logging in, and from where.
As I do with most things, I first scour the net for advice so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure I could probably figure it out on my …