Calagator / Calendar hosting

[Derek Gathright]

Calagator is an open-source project written by peeps in Portland to keep track of their dozens of weekly tech events.  We've always talked about the need for a central calendar, and I think this is a good solution (it's apparently worked great for them).  So, anyone have a Rails host that they could install it on?

http://calagator.org/

http://github.com/calagator/calagator/tree/master

Domain suggestions?

kccal.org?

techcal.org?

Related note: You all really should listen to Ep 64 of FLOSS Weekly.  They interviewed a couple people from Portland who are organizing the Open Source Bridge conference, which is an attempt to replace some of the conferences they've lost over the last few years (OScon, RailsConf, etc...).  Sounds like they have an amazing local tech scene and it is somethng I'd be thrilled to have even half of what they do.  Check it @ http://twit.tv/floss64

[Steven Chau]

Derek,

Check out http://kccal.heroku.com/.  We have some serious theming to do.

[Derek Gathright]

Nice work.  I'm clicking around, some pages work, others generate 500 errors.

http://kccal.heroku.com/events

Guessing it prolly has something to do with the DB.  

Do you know if Heroku can support us setting it up on something like kccal.org?

[Derek Gathright]

Answered my own question about the custom domain.

If the rest of you get a free moment, check out heroku.com.  Awesome website.  

[Jon Crawford]

Yes, Heroku does indeed support actual domains.  Although it HAS to be "www.something.com" in my experience.  You have to fwd "something.com" to "www.something.com" a la http://www.twodollarturkey.com.

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Jon Crawford

ma...@joncrawford.com

816.808.2681

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Storenvy.com

[Steven Chau]

Sorry i haven't purchased the domain yet. Are we good with kccal.com or .org?

[Jon Crawford]

http://herokugarden.com/ is also really cool if you're interested in Rails and want to play with it without configuring the whole stack locally.  It also feeds right into Heroku.

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Jon Crawford

ma...@joncrawford.com

816.808.2681

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Storenvy.com

[Jon Crawford]

Should it be something like KCTechCal.com?

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Jon Crawford

ma...@joncrawford.com

816.808.2681

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Storenvy.com

[Derek Gathright]

http://herokugarden.com/ is also really cool if you're interested in Rails and want to play with it without configuring the whole stack locally.  It also feeds right into Heroku.

Nice, I'm always a fan of free hosting.

Speaking of which, while not free... this is at least really cheap, has anyone played around with Slicehost.com?  I got a 256mb slice a few days ago and am amazed at the speed.  For only $20 / month you essentially get your own VPS, and the coolest part is that you can scale it up/down simply by rebooting (a far more difficult task on EC2).  The cheapest slice (quad-processor virtual CPU) is actually out-performing our dedicated server at Rackspace for media (FFMPEG) transcoding by about 30%.

[Shashank Date]

I have not used SliceHost myself, but have heard only good things about it. Some times, I understand, they may take a while to set you up... up to 5 weeks. Don't know if it is true anymore.

- Shashank

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This is not a signature

[Derek Gathright]

Wow, that sucks.  For me it was create an account, click a button, and within a minute I got an email saying my slice was up & running.

[Derek Gathright]

Actually, scratch my recommendation for Slicehost, go with Mosso's CloudServers.  They're both Rackspace companies (through recent acquisitions) and are the same product, but Mosso's is only $12/month (billed at $0.015 / hour) versus Slicehost which is $20 / month.  Free support (limited time) with Mosso too.  CloudServers also has integration with CloudFiles (their S3 equivalent).

While we already have free hosting available for semi-proprietary development platforms with services like Google's App Engine, Heroku, and to an extent Facebook, OpenSocial, etc... I wonder when these VPS hosts (EC2, Slicehost, Prgmr) eventually make their low-end services free?

Compare this to 10 years ago when web startups needed to secure $10 million of funding to buy servers before they could even launch a product.  Now, start on a sub $100/month server, and scale it up (and out) as you need to.  Amazing.

[Derek Gathright]

Alright, at this point I've totally derailed this thread, but check this out....

http://www.mosso.com/landingpage_filesplugin.jsp

Attention Developers: The Rackspace Cloud is holding a contest for the best plug-in, add-on widget, sidebar or thingamajig for our unlimited web storage offering – Cloud Files. The grand prize is valued at more than $3,600 in cash and services*, including $1,000 cash and one full year of free services* from The Rackspace Cloud portfolio!

Examples of plug-ins may include:

    * A Wordpress/Typepad, etc. plug-in for backing up your blog database to Cloud Files, or perhaps even a full blog content backup to Cloud Files.

    * A Firefox plug-in like FeBe – but where all of your Firefox settings are backed up to Cloud Files.

    * A Wordpress plug-in that lets you upload a file to a CDN-enabled container, and embed the CDN link from within Wordpress.

Hopefully you get the idea. Useful, cool, easy–to-use, and non-obtrusive are some of the characteristics that we are looking for, so grease those mental gears and get the ideas a churnin’! 

Prizes:

    * Grand Prize: $3640 in cash and services*, including $1000 cash and one full year of free Rackspace Cloud services* and promotion through press release and the Rackspace Cloud website.

    * Second Place Prize: $1820 in cash and services*, including $500 cash and six months of free Rackspace Cloud services*.

    * Third Place Prize: $910 in cash and services*, including $250 cash and three months of free Rackspace Cloud services*.

    * All contestants with qualified entries will receive a free Rackspace Cloud t-shirt and $25 credit toward Cloud Files Services.

So, anyone have some good ideas?  Since it is community voting, involve Twitter and your votes just went up 1000%.  CloudFiles seems really easy to interact with, and the client library APIs have already been built for every language (see sidebar @ http://www.mosso.com/cloudfiles_cdn.jsp)

What are some examples of applications w/ plugin support?

- Blogs

- Firefox

- Desktop widgets

- Google gadgets

- Skype (right?)

- others?