heisel.org

Checking out Odeo

Thursday | June 23, 2005 | 9:51 am  

I just got my invite to Odeo, which is pretty sweet so far.

I’ll do a more detailed write up this weekend (sorry… my days belong to work and my nights belong to a Rails project for her), but here’s my first impressions.

What it is

The site promises to be a one-stop shop for finding, subscribing, downloading, and creating your own Podcasts.

At the moment, the Podcast creation tools aren’t released yet, but it’s an early beta — no big whoop.

The design

I can’t say enough about the site’s design. It’s great stylelistically and in terms of intuitiveness.

It feels like a more subdued, yet more hip, iTunes Music Store for Podcasts (sans the monetary exchange, at least for now).

One standout feature is the ability to preview the Podcast without leaving the site or firing up an mp3 player on your desktop.

When a featured Podcast is listed, or when you’re viewing a Podcast’s info page, there are nice, unobtrusive controls that let you play, rewind, and fast-foward a Podcast, as well as add it to your subscription list.

There are links to add your own Podcast to the directory, but it’s downplayed on many pages.

I think for Odeo’s directory to become a success they need to play up the ability to add your existing Podcast to the site.

That, and a killer API.

The directory

The ‘listen’ section is a directory of available Podcasts. You can view featured Podcasts, search for Podcasts or browse by tags, popularity, and recentness.

The tagging decision is interesting as it’s the first time I’ve seen it applied to content not created by the user.

With Flickr and del.icio.us the end user is creating content (either photos or bookmarks), and they have an interest in tagging them to organize their content.

Though tagging a feed in Odeo is just as easy, I didn’t find myself tagging any of them while perusing the available feeds.

Perhaps, like the Wikipedia, a core group of users will find themselves tagging content.

Once you’ve found Podcasts you’d like to subscribe to, one-click adds them to your qeue for syncing with your desktop computer / iPod.

The Odeo Syncer

It’s Python powered, whoo-hoo!

It breaks on my Panther (10.3.6) machine at work, snap!

When I get a chance to try it at home I’ll give it a shot.

That’s all I’ve got for now… I’ll post a more in-depth review once I can try out the syncing/downloading functionality.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology, Web design

For Google, Rails on Tiger not reading database.yml

Saturday | June 18, 2005 | 10:59 pm  

It’s late but I thought I should post this for folks Googling…

If you’re trying to develop a Rails app locally on your Tiger Mac, and it seems like your app isn’t reading your username and password for your MySQL database server, here’s the issue.

Rails ships with a built-in all-Ruby MySQL adapter that doesn’t seem to pick up that username/pass. I’m not smart enough to tell you why, but it doesn’t.

So you’ll need to install MySQL, which you can get here.

Then do:

sudo gem install mysql — –with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

That installs a native-built MySQL adapter. Your Rails app will pick up the DB config and all will be well with the world.

Update: I should have included the error message you’ll see. You’ll get something along the lines of this:

Permission denied for use ''@'yourdomain.really.is.here.com' (Using Password: NO)

And you’ll get this despite the fact that you have a username and password in the database.yml file.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Technology

Dreamhost has Rails, Fastcgi

Saturday | June 18, 2005 | 1:56 pm  

Hooray!

Dreamhost now supports Rails and FastCGI.

Now, other than this blog, I’m normally a TextDrive kind of person, but Erica’s school signed a contract with Dreamhost.

I probably should have advised them to sign up with TextDrive, but at the time I hadn’t used them that long and Dreamhost was a known quantity that I’d feel safe in recommending.

Plus, at the time, the school was just looking for cheap hosting for their mostly static with a wee bit o’ PHP site — which Dreamhost is fine for.

But subsequently, they’ve been looking to do more and more and more with their Web site, and in hindsight, I’ve been wishing that I’d sent them to TextDrive because of their great support for developer-friendly technologies.

But now that Dreamhost has Rails, I can help them build some great apps (in my spare time, ha ha), until they can make a move to TextDrive.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Projects, Technology, Web design