Fwd: Introducing Splashy!

[Joe Moore]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joe Moore <j...@pivotallabs.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 6:17 PM
Subject: Introducing Splashy!
To: Edward Hieatt <edw...@pivotallabs.com>, David Stevenson <ste...@pivotallabs.com>, commo...@pivotallabs.com, opens...@pivotallabs.com, Parker Thompson <par...@pivotallabs.com>


Since I was snowed-in today babysitting a maintenance crew in my apartment, I worked on the splash-page/email gathering application.  As an excuse to explore new technologies, especially those that we have had brown-bag about, I wrote it in Sinatra, HAML, Sequel (a lean ORM), and deployed it to Heroku.  The result is Splashy, the lead-collecting splash page, complete with one-step installation (ok... 3 steps, if you count the git clone and change directory). 

Feel free to play with it.  We could easily use something like this in conjunction with Parker's A-B testing ideas.  I did not spend much time on the UI itself, an it could use some love... perhaps we can use some of the ideas from Koda's splash page that David S. worked on regarding spam protection, etc.

Get it here: 
git clone piv...@git.pivotallabs.com:/home/pivotal/splashy.git

-- Joe

Here's the readme
--------------------------------

Welcome to Splashy, a splash-page/lead-capture application written with Sinatra, Sequel, HAML, and deployable to Heroku.

The following are prerequisites for installing Splashy:

• you have cloned this application locally
• you have a Heroku account (get one at http://heroku.com)
• you have a public key on your machine; run ssh-keygen if you don't
• you are running mysql with the Pivotal-standard username/password. These can be changed later if you wish.

Install

1. git clone piv...@git.pivotallabs.com:/home/pivotal/splashy.git
2. cd splashy
3. ruby install.rb

If something goes wrong, look at install in Rakefile to track down the problem.

URLs You Care About

• http://your-splashy-app.com -- The splash page with name/email capture. This is whatever URL Heroku assigned you, such as http://deep-galaxy-68.heroku.com/
• http://your-splashy-app.com/admin -- The basic-auth protected list of Leads who have signed up. Look in splashy.rb for the username/password.

References

• Sinatra: http://www.sinatrarb.com
• Heroku: http://heroku.com
• Sequel: http://sequel.rubyforge.org/
• HAML: http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/

Todo:

• Get created_at working. Lead creation date-time not currently being captured.
• Better UI and spam protection.