Extending jQuery UI’s Autocomplete to Improve Success
December 4th, 2011 // 1:28 pm @ matt
On Black Book Singles, one of the steps in the signup process is to provide the city and country in which you live. The country part is easy to get right since it’s a simple drop-down list where the user can be sure that the value they’ve selected is correct. The problem most users are [...]
Read More »Android Voice Recognition in Appcelerator Titanium
November 19th, 2011 // 11:32 am @ matt
One of my most recent tasks at Food on the Table was to implement speech recognition for our meal planning app’s grocery list on Android. Now that the first version of the feature is released, the fully featured product allows users to quickly add items just by speaking into their phone. Not only that, but [...]
Read More »Rotating Paperclip Image Attachments in Rails
October 22nd, 2011 // 3:30 pm @ matt
With users uploading personal photos, especially ones coming their phones that capture landscape photos in portrait mode and vice versa, one of the things I wanted to integrate into Black Book Singles is the ability to rotate photos. Since I’m using the Paperclip gem, this should be relatively easy to achieve through a custom attachment [...]
Read More »Credit Where Credit Is Due
October 20th, 2011 // 6:00 pm @ matt
While I continue to work on my free online dating service (as well as the accompanying Android dating app), I delve into new territories of Ruby, Rails, and Android programming that I previously have not had to deal with. As such, I’m constantly searching for info to teach myself where to start, where to turn, [...]
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Tracking New User Registrations by Source & Search Terms
October 7th, 2011 // 4:38 pm @ matt
In order to better analyze my registrations, I wanted to be able to associate them with their respective traffic sources and any search terms used to find my dating service. While searching for an existing gem that takes care of this, the closest thing I could find was a plugin named search_sniffer. Unfortunately, this plugin [...]
Read More »Simple User Registration Spam Prevention in Rails 3
October 5th, 2011 // 10:42 pm @ matt
Tonight, in a little under an hour, I was able to implement spam prevention for my user registration flow thanks to the simple API provided by Stop-Registration-Spam.org. In Rails 3, creating new validators is relatively painless. Create a new validator class in a folder defined by you. For my project, I decided to place all [...]
Read More »Baker to Builder: From CakePHP to Rails
September 30th, 2011 // 12:03 pm @ matt
This past Tuesday night, I gave my first presentation for an Austin on Rails meeting. As a Ruby on Rails developer who comes from a PHP background — specifically utilizing CakePHP — I was asked to present on my experiences between the two frameworks. The presentation itself covers beginner level material. It describes my personal [...]
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