Ben Curtis

Recently I received a request from another B2B SaaS vendor to integrate with Catch the Best, so their users could pull their data from Catch the Best into this app. This is a classic use-case for OAuth, so I dove in to learning how to make my Rails app an OAuth provider. ...
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I was banging my head against a Facebook Connect problem with one of my clients’ Rails apps recently, and I thought I’d share a useful tidbit I gleaned from the experience, in case it can spare someone else the headache I had. This app originally supported just plain-old users who created an account at the...
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Well, I’ve put this off for as long as I could, but I think now is the time to make my first hire. I’m busy enough with client work and with my own projects that I need some help. So, if you or someone you know is looking for a part-time Rails...
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In case you haven’t seen it yet, Shopify has a brilliant developer platform that makes it easy for developers to create Shopify add-ons that can be marketed to Shopify store owners. And now, for even more awesomeness, there’s the Shopify App Rails Kit that makes it incredibly easy to build an app to...
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I realized a couple of days ago that it was January of 2007 when I dove into the crazy world of freelancing full-time. It has been quite an adventure. In that time I’ve worked on a number of fun projects with an amazing assortment of awesome clients, launched two different products (Catch...
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For some reason I find myself starting new projects on holidays. Perhaps it’s mental decompression, or just an excuse to have some fun. Either way, today’s holiday project was a little smaller than usual—I’m already done! It’s a tiny Sinatra app for allowing people to anonymously submit tickets to your Unfuddle...
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If you’d like to get a 404 response when you encounter a MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound error, which is the default response for ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, simply toss this in your initializer where you set up your Mongo connection (I use config/initializers/mongo.rb): ActionController::Base.rescue_responses = :not_found
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If you’d like to go to RubyConf next week, but you don’t have a ticket, you’re in luck! Sadly, I can’t go, so I have a ticket available for sale for $250. Drop me a line at ben at this domain if you’re interested. Update: Sold!
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I’m still loving the EngineYard Cloud for my client deployments. I encountered one snag today, though, when cloning an environment for staging: Custom chef recipes do not get cloned along with the rest of the environment. This means that if you have uplaoded/deployed custom chef recipes for, say, a production environment, and then...
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I needed to deploy an anonymous FTP server, and of course I wanted to do it using Chef, so I went looking for a Chef recipe to install ProFTPD. Sadly, the lazyweb failed me. So, I did some actual work so the lazyweb won’t fail you. :) Here is the commit that adds...
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