We recently started using PostMark on KickoffLabs. So far the service has been excellent. Unfortunately, not all of our emails fit their terms of service. I looked around for how configure an addition SMTP server via Action Mailer (and Mail gem). Surprisingly, this is not supported.

I am really digging using Octopress (see Moving to Octopress and Octopress Customizations).

Here are a couple of tips to make your experience using it even better.

Here is a quick list of non-style changes I made before deploying my Octopress site (see it all on Github):

If you are reading this, my move to Octopress should be complete.

Octopress is a framework built on Jekyll and maintained by Brandon Mathis. It adds two killer features to Jekyll.

Building software is increasingly mixing and matching a variety of services with a small bit of your own special sauce.

I recently shipped a new service, DearEmmy in just a couple of hours leveraging three phenomenal services.

Last week I started building a fun new project, DearEmmy (more on this shortly). DearEmmy makes use of Twilio’s new client feature as well as Pusher for real time updates.

Everything was going great, until I fired up Internet Explorer[1] and saw just about nothing in the app was working.

ActiveAdmin is a nice way to quickly build admin pages. Think of it as a scaffolding on steriods. It is probably not ideal for most customers, but you can accomplish quite a bit with minimal effort.

One of the models I was editing with ActiveAdmin accepts HTML in a textarea. I find the thought of writing even a single angle bracket nauseating these days, so I decided to convert the editor into a WYSIWYG editor with TinyMCE.

ActiveAdmin is a rails engine which plugs directly into your existing app. It provides a nifty little DSL for building UI screens. Getting the editor to work took just a couple of minutes once you understand the basic pieces.

Today is the official launch day of KickoffLabs.

Today KickoffLabs is officially live and accepting customers! Scott and I want to thank everyone who signed up on our own KickoffLabs “coming soon” page, shared our blog posts and tweets, helped us kick the tires on the private beta, and sent encouraging words along the way. Thank You! KickoffLabs is Open for Business!

There are a lot of interesting lessons and observations to share over the next week or two, but for now, I am going to just take a deep breath and watch for all of your account confirmation signup emails. :)

We are just about ready to put KickoffLabs into production mode. One of the last big tasks was setting up SSL.

Obviously, do not we want to push SSL support live without first testing it, so I set out to set it up locally.

I considered a variety of approaches and eventually settled on using Pow with nginx as a reverse proxy.

For the record, I am not sure this is a good practice. In fact, I am pretty for for accessibility it is probably the not the best solution…but for now this is how it works.

The scenario:

When selecting a theme in KickoffLabs we allow a user to simply click on a preview image which is wrapped in a div. This executes a bit of javascript and properly stores the selected id so it can be sent to the server and stored in the database. In an earlier version this was simply a select element which Capybara has a simple built in method for (select). Once this was changed to a div (or image) the spec broke.

Thankfully, the fix is quite simple, just use find (which returns an element) and execute click.

1

find("#Energy_Blue").click

Also, since this is executing javascript, it requires the use of the javascript driver.