24 hour project: emailegg.com

[Daniel Higginbotham]

So this weekend I decided to go nuts and see what I could get done in 24 hours, and I put together http://emailegg.com

It took about 12 hours from the time I started to the time I had it fully functioning. Since then I've tweaked the wording over and over, but that doesn't really count, right? :P

Anyway, I'd love feedback on the site. All the recent activity about helping out new folks / lurkers made me want to spend some quality time with Ruby, and it was super fun. I don't know about everyone else, but when I first got into Ruby I was obsessed with it for months. Every single day I woke up excited to play with it and learn more.

In fact, for awhile now I've had the idea to compile a bunch of "Ruby stories" - what it was like for you to start w/ Ruby, how things changed for you - and put them somewhere. Maybe that's super cheesy? If anyone's interested, let me know. I could even put together something if folks want to see what I'm talking about.

And since I'm rambling on and on - if anyone's in the Natick area and wants to hack on stuff, let me know and let's figure out a time and place.

The End

[Mark Chang]

Very nice. In the spirit of learning and providing materials for "ruby stories", you want to detail some of the development? I'd be interested to hear your choices for deployment, email back end, parsing, etc.

Feedback

 1) probably against the simplicity of the service, but part of me wants an acknowledgment that my reminder was recorded. yeah, feature creep.

 2) failing #1, how about adding a status@ option to reply with all the pending reminders?

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Mark L. Chang

[Daniel Higginbotham]

Thanks for the feedback! With #1, I've been on the fence about that. I don't want to clutter up someone's inbox even more, you know? So yeah, maybe #2 is the best way to go :)

Here's my stack:

* namecheap

* heroku; add-ons include:

** mailgun -  $19/month service so I could add the emailegg.com domain

** mongolab - free plan

** scheduler - runs a rake task every 10 minutes to send the emails back to mailgun

* rails 3.2.3

* haml

* mongoid

* rest-client for sending the emails to mailgun

* chronic for parsing the time, along with some small customizations

* compass

* susy for the grid

* rspec

Sinatra probably would have been a better framework choice except that I barely ever use it, and if I end up growing this thing I feel more comfortable having rails in place.

Susy is a great little library for doing grids: http://susy.oddbird.net/ . Compass also has lots of nifty tools. It really makes it easy to do CSS3 stuff. I like twitter bootstrap for more application-y sites, but for my blog and for more content-y sites I prefer susy.

At first I was going to put this on a linode but I ended up going with heroku because it continues to be an enabler of my habit of not taking the time to learn modern rails deployment. Their mongolab add-on is a huge win, and I've used it for a few projects now. I've never had to take care of mongodb server, and it seems like learning that would be an art in itself, and who really wants that headache?

My tests for mailgun integration aren't as thorough as I'd like, and I'm not sure where I'd start with that.

I hope this is useful :)

[Eric Beland]

> It took about 12 hours from the time I started to the time I had it fully functioning. Since then I've tweaked  the wording over and over, but that doesn't really count, right? :P

That's impressive!  Lately I've been thinking about hacking on a gem for command line operations that help you bootstrap new apps (for hackathons, etc).

Ideas:

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Daniel Higginbotham <dan...@flyingmachinestudios.com> wrote:

[Mark Chang]

excuse my ignorance, but what is the scheduler task for? I would assume you would receive emails from mailgun to the app, parse, and send them back to mailgun with a delivery time parameter.

[Daniel Higginbotham]

Yeah I thought about doing that. It's probably better to do it that way, in fact. The emails are being stored because I have this vague notion about adding an ical feed or maybe a page for you to cancel reminders.

[Mark Chang]

If you store and forward every 10 minutes, how do you get < 10 minute reminder emails? I'm missing something.

[Daniel Higginbotham]

When the task runs, it also picks up everything that should be sent up to 7 minutes from now and sends those. I figure that's good enough. I guess I don't really see someone using it to get  a reminder in 8 minutes on the nose

[Daniel Higginbotham]

Thanks!

I think the ideas are missing?

[Eric Beland]

Thanks  for asking Daniel.  Half what I wrote went awol.  The ideas were:

- search leandomainsearch.com for a domain name

- Use the namecheap api to register a domain name

- set up A records

- set up DNS

- set up email/cname/mx

- submit to/setup email whitelists

- anything else that takes any time... and can be automated or scripted with a headless browser...

Just wondering if something like that would be handy in hackfests (and if anyone wanted to hack on it also, perhaps in one of these same hackfests)... :-)

-Eric

[Eric Beland]

Daniel, also meant to say, I'm in Natick also, so drop a me line offline at ebe...@gmail.com and we can set up some time to hack if you like...

[Mark Chang]

Oh, I'm in Needham. Evening hack? I can provide plenty of space at Olin College.

Mark L. Chang

[Daniel Higginbotham]

Eric and I will be hacking @10am on Saturday at the Starbucks beside Dick's sporting goods in that plaza across from the mall. Not sure how late we'll be hanging out but all are welcome to come join us :)

Daniel