Hey everyone, we’re now roughly half-way through the voting process. We’ve got some great apps in the running this year. The top of the leaderboard really looks fantastic.

We’ve also seen a generous amount of media coverage for competitors and their apps, including articles at SitePoint, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Welcome to all our new judges that found us through those sources. I hope you enjoy checking out some brand new web properties and helping us determine who deserves to take home the prizes. If you know other folks who may be interested, please invite them! Anyone can vote. Selection is a collaborative process and the more opinions we have, the better. Remember that a random selection of judges will also win Amazon gift certificates, so there’s a little bit of extra motivation!

As an additional bit of housekeeping, note that we have had to disqualify a few teams for rule violations. If you have reason to believe that an entry has violated the rules, please contact us directly rather than just giving them low scores in your ballots because you suspect something. We will investigate any allegations brought to us that have merit.

Before I go I’d also like to call your attention to a number of special offers being offered to participants through our sponsors. If you log into your account and view the user profile, those offers are listed in the right hand column. Thanks again to Linode, JanRain, RailsKits, and the other companies who are offering special discounts on their services to our judges and participants. You can find some awesome savings here on hosting, a free version of JanRain’s RPX service (for easy OpenID integration), and much more.

In case you haven’t already heard, voting is now open for the 2008 Rails Rumble! Rumble team members already have the ability to vote and just need to log into their accounts to get started. If you weren’t competing but are interested in judging applications, just sign-up for a new account and you’ll be off and running.

How It Works

We’re doing something a little different this year. Voting is not being conducted via the typical free-for-all, anything goes ratings system. For the 2008 event, voters are issued ballots for a limited number of competition apps each day. Each ballot consists of four criteria to rate an app on a five star scale:

• Appearance — The professionalism of the app’s design, aesthetics, usability
• Completeness — How finished does this app feel? Is it missing key features that make it unusable? Is it buggy?
• Innovation — How original and innovative is the app? Is it new, unique, and different or just a rehash of an existing idea?
• Usefulness — Is there an audience for this app? Will it be useful to them? Something they can really use? Or is it superfluous?

This system is designed to evenly distribute ballots for each competition app and only allow each voter’s ballot to count once — though a voter can revise their ratings at any time. Finally, voters will receive new ballots each day, but only to replace the ballots cast.

Why?

It’s understandable that some might be frustrated by this system — especially if they are unable to vote on their favorite apps right away. Remember that the Rumble is not just about winning prizes, but promoting Rails, the Rails community, and all the apps built within the 48 hour event. By going with a ballot system, we’re seeking to level the playing field between apps as much as possible, eliminate ballot stuffing, and ensure that apps are judged based on their individual merits rather than being a simple popularity contest.

In Summary

In summary, getting your vote on is simple:

1. Sign-up for an account if you don’t already have one
2. Check out each of the apps identified in your freshly minted batch of ballots
3. Rate each app on Appearance, Completeness, Innovation, and Usefulness
4. Come back tomorrow and use your next batch of ballots

Voting ends at Midnight GMT on 1 Novemember, 2008. Get out, check out those apps, and cast those ballots! Make sure to tell your friends, your family, and especially your fans. Anyone can vote — the more voter diversity we have, the better.

He waits.



For the Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Rails Rumble, the organizers team have included this mint condition Chuck Norris Undercover Agent Action figure from 1986, still in the original packaging. He comes with Sekitei Sommersault Action too, so you’re sure to be the coolest kid on the block with Chuck Norris on your side :-)

PS – Voting will be opening very soon…

Our good friend Benjamin Curtis over at RailsKits is offering 15% off any order at http://railskits.com to all the Rails Rumble participants, whether your app wins or not! How cool is that?? Just use this discount code: railsrumble – it will be good through the end of November.

Thanks a million to RailsKits and all of our fantastic sponsors! :-)

Due to overwhelming demand, we’ve decided to give contestants one last chance to fix any show stopper bugs (similar to last year). Because we want to get voting open as soon as possible, there are a few conditions on this.

Firstly, you’ll be allowed to change up to 10 lines from the railsrumble tag. If you didn’t get the tag in on time BUT your code was relatively complete before hand – you can also use the last commit made before 00:00 (but please note, in this case you will need to let us know).

For this to work smoothly, we’re giving you until 23:59GMT on the 21st – that is, Midnight, Tuesday night GMT.

If you do this, you’ll then need to tag this new change (note: only 1 commit is allowed) as “railsrumble-fix” and then email organizers@railsrumble.com with the subject “Fixed Release” telling us your team name as well as a link to the tag on github. (once that’s done, we’ll check your deployed version – if you’re not changing it, an email letting us know would be good as well).

So in summary, you’ve got until 23:59GMT to submit a single commit with up to 10 lines changed (so, either 10 unique adds / deletes OR one line changed). To prepare do this (assuming you’ve tagged it), you can do the following:

git checkout railsrumble

Which will checkout the railsrumble tag – verifying you’re at the correct starting revision. Then, make your changes. You can type “git diff” to get a diff of your changes. Once you’re sure you’re made a correct amount (0 to 10), you can commit and push your changes by doing the following:

git commit -a -m "Modifications to correct railsrumble" 
git tag railsrumble-fix
git push
git push --tags

Note that we only intend you to use this commit to fix any show stopper bugs – e.g. a 500 on your login page, something preventing people from logging in and the like.

edit: Please redeploy your app as well, changing the :branch option in your capistrano file (if used) to railsrumble-fix

Thanks, — The RailsRumble Team

Alright people, the build portion of the 2008 Rails Rumble competition is now officially closed. Please resist the temptation to push any further changes to your Linodes or you will be disqualified. Srsly. As Darcy mentioned in the previous blog post, competing teams still have 24 hours to finish editing their profiles and provide SSH keys to us.

Once that’s settled it will take us a day or two to sort through all the contributions before opening the voting floodgates. Stay tuned. We’ll post an announcement via the blog and the alerts list when voting has officially begun. In the meantime, if you’ve been a casual observer until now, make sure you Sign up to judge!

From what we’ve seen so far, we’re very, very (very!) impressed with the quality of the applications this year. We think you will be too. There are some truly amazing ideas. Thank you all for your hard work.

Hola Rumblers!

It’s almost the end of the competition—less than 3 hours to go. We need you to do a couple things to make your entry official.

Tag Your Code

Once your code is done, you’ll need to push it to github, tag it, and then deploy to your server with said tag. If you’re not sure how, we’ve produced a short little screencast to walk you through the process.

If you don’t want to watch the whole screencast, you can instead just use the following commands from your application root. Note, you’ll want to commit and push any changes to github first.

git tag railsrumble
git push
git push --tags

Then, you need to go to your github page to verify it has been added (if you hover over the ‘tags’ item at the top, it should show ‘railsrumble’ as a link). Once that’s done, you need to update your application to use the tagged version of the code. If you’re using Capistrano, it’s as easy as setting / changing your branch in your config/deploy.rb file.

set :branch, "railsrumble"

And then deploy once more. You can verify it by comparing the hash next to “commit” when you click on the railsrumble tag on github (if you’re confused, please see the video).

If you have manually cloned it to your server, you just need to type the following:

git pull
git checkout railsrumble

And it should be done.

Server SSH Keys / Access

For us to be able to examine your deployed application, we’re going to need you to do two things. First off, we’ll need you to add add our ssh public key to the user you’ve deployed as (or a user who can read all of your deployed application’s files) – said key being available at http://railsrumble.com/rumble_id_rsa.pub If you’re using ubuntu / debian, the following should work when logged in as said user:

cd ~
mkdir -p .ssh
wget http://railsrumble.com/rumble_id_rsa.pub
cat rumble_id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 700 .ssh
chmod 644 .ssh/authorized_keys

Once that has been done, we need you to visit your team profile (e.g. http://railsrumble.com/teams/my-awesome-team) and find the grey section just under the title for the “WHERE” section which contains a link to set the username which you added the aforementioned ssh public key to.

Finally, Once that’s been completed / added (and the your deployed username appears under the where section on your team profile as “Your VPS Username”), we’ll verify access over the next few days.

Profile Changes

Once the competition is closed, your team will have 24 hours to edit it’s profile. What this means for you is that if you wish to add a screenshot, a info / screencast url – you must do so before 23:59GMT on October 20th.

Please note that if you submitted a screenshot earlier and it isn’t showing up on your team profile, you will need to readd it now.

The Competition Close

Summary: Repository must have tag at competition close, you have 24 hours to add the other stuff starting from the competition end.

That’s pretty much all of it now for the actual required stuff. You’ll still be able to access your VPS and GitHub repositories once the competition closes – just make sure you don’t change the code deployed for your application (e.g. so you can use script/console and you can restart servers etc BUT you can’t edit / add migrations or change your app code).

Most of all, thanks for competing – we hope you’ve all had a blast and we look forward to seeing just what can be built in 48 hours.

All the Rumble winners will be receiving a custom designed, limited edition Rails Rumble 2008 t-shirt. Check it out!

Thanks a million to our Sponsors Viget Labs for the design and to CustomInk for the printing! Rockin’!

If you haven’t gotten them already, our partners at New Leaders have created a couple little presents to share with all of this year’s Rumblers!

• Countdown clock
• Rumble Blog Widget

Big thanks guys, great ideas!

Well, it’s midnight (GMT). That means that the floodgates are now open as the build portion of the 2008 Rails Rumble competition has begun. We’re extremely excited to see what you’ll be building over the next 48 hours and we hope that you make the best of it!

Here are a few important notes pertaining to teams who are participating in the build portion of the event:

• If you’ve already added your GitHub (http://github.com) username you should be good to go. You’ll find the relevant account information on your team profile page. If you haven’t heeded our warnings and have not yet added your GitHub username to your personal profile, add it now! A periodic task will be running every 20 minutes to update permissions so the sooner you do it the sooner you’ll have the access you need.

• Similarly, your Linode (http://linode.com) VPS access information should be found on your team profile page. Feel free to login with it and start building your VPS. I’d suggest a distro that doesn’t need to be compiled from source ;-).

• When you’re finished on Sunday evening (or sooner), make sure to tag the version of the code that you’re going to push to your VPS as ‘railsrumble’. This is extremely important. Teams with a final deployed codebase that differs from the version bearing that tag may be disqualified.

• Also make sure to update your team profile information before wrapping things up. You’ll find new fields to list third party libraries and tools used, etc. Further editing of this information will be frozen after Sunday night (the close of the build portion of the competition) in preparation for voting.

• RunCodeRun (http://runcoderun.com) has been generous enough to offer seats for 100 projects for their hosted Continuous Integration service to Rails Rumble users. See the email that was sent to participating team members and alerts list participants for more information and the invitation code. Or ask in IRC.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to email organizers at railsrumble.com. We’ll be monitoring this box and will respond as we can. Better yet, visit us in #railsrumble on the Freenode IRC network. That’s the best way to get immediate help and also to connect with other Rumblers.

Take care, best of luck, and make sure to get plenty of sleep. Seriously!

The fine folks over at 99Designs can help. If your team has considered getting some help via a contest on 99Designs, by all means go for it, but not until the Rumble starts! :-)

They have “fast track” contests that run for 24 hours so if you need a logo designed for you app, there is plenty of time. Just sign up and launch your contest. You will have to pay the fast track upgrade and your prize amount ($100 for logos), however 99Designs has kindly offered to refund the fast track contest upgrade fee ($54). Simply email them with your 99Designs user id after your contest finishes.

Thanks to 99Designs the awesome prize donation to the Best Solo Project category and to all of our fantastic sponsors, once again, we are grateful to all of you for your support!

Now let’s get ready to RUMBLE!!!!!

Our buds over at Intridea have provided us with a Present.ly account to use for the duration of the Rumble. Thanks guys, you rock!

If you have already created a Present.ly account for the Rails Rumble, click here to log in.

To give you some background info, Present.ly is a communication platform that, like Twitter, is designed to allow for short, frequent updates to be posted by individuals and tracked or “followed” by others. Unlike Twitter, however, Present.ly provides a secure and private way to share updates among members of a company or organization without it being visible to the outside world.

Present.ly offers several features that should be of particular interest to Rails Rumblers:

• Groups – with Present.ly, you can create a group of your Rails Rumble teammates. When you send updates out to a group, only the members of the group will see your updates.
• Attachments – use Present.ly to share your most recent mockup, screencast, or data diagram. You can attach files to your updates, which appear right in your update stream.
• Text Attachments / Code Snippets – need more than 140 characters to get your point across, or want to share a code snippet with language-specific code highlighting? Use our text attachments to attach longer text or code snippets to your update.
• Twitter integration – rather than taking the time to post separately to both Present.ly and Twitter, you can now post to Twitter through Present.ly. Just configure your Twitter username and password in Settings, and start your update/tweet with t!. Your post will automatically be dual-posted to Twitter and Present.ly.

Invitations have now been sent to everyone on our mailing list, if you don’t get one or are not on our list but would like one, please shoot us an email!

With this year's competition just 9 hours away (as I write this), we wanted to draw your attention to one of our sponsors' products — Signalfire by New Leaders — which we believe will come in handy for many teams.

Signalfire is a nice in-browser chat room ... but not just any old browser-based chat! New Leaders' kick ass design makes it simple to do the majority of things most teams need to do like invite new members to chat or upload mockups. And one of the best features is that it's 100% free no matter how many rooms or members you have.

So if you still haven't organised a way for your team to communicate effectively, make sure you check out Signalfire.

In the last email we sent out and blog post, we mentioned needing to update your profiles / information. Unfortunately, in hindsight the instructions weren't very clear in regards to which profile was which so I thought I'd quickly (for those having trouble finding the fields) post a walk through of updating the information.

It's all in pictures w/ screenshots from the app itself (note: the wording on the header is slightly different) but hopefully it should give you a basic idea of where to go. Please note that if you can't read a specific image, you can click on it to get a full sized version.

Read the rest of this entry

Hello Rumblers,

It’s that time of the year again – The RailsRumble is almost upon us. In less than 48 hours, The 2008 competition will start. At 00:00 GMT, October 18th (that is, as it turns midnight on the Friday / Saturday coming), we’ll let the gates open for everyone to compete.

Read the rest of this entry

That’s right everyone, Rails Rumble 2008 prizes are here!

We’d like to once again thank all of this year’s competition sponsors for their generous contributions. Without them we would never be able to organize such an awesome competition!

All of these companies are actively involved with Ruby and Rails—supporting, promoting, and nurturing the development community. Please take a little time and visit the sponsors page and see what all these awesome companies have to offer!

You can also check out their sites for more great info:

Linode GitHub Thoughtbot, Inc. Rails Forum O’Reilly Media Engine Yard ActiveState Rails Kits PeepCode Ubikorp

JanRain Cashboard Apress Inc. New Leaders Intridea Present.ly Viget Labs CustomInk.com RunCodeRun 99Designs

We would also like to announce an additional prize category this year – something special we’ve added just for our voters. Because voters need love too.

This year, 5 randomly chosen voters will be awarded a $20 amazon gift card, so if you are not participating as a contestant this year, you can still win something just for voting! So get yourself signed up already!

And without further ado, The 2008 Rails Rumble Prize list.

The fine folks over at Relevance will be offering up 100 accounts on their brand-new hosted continuous integration platform, RunCodeRun, for use by Rails Rumble teams this year. Details on how to sign up, including the invite code, will be revealed once the build portion of the competition begins at Midnight GMT on the 18th.

Should you decide to take advantage of RunCodeRun for your Rumble entry, there are a couple of things you should know:

• Accounts will be limited to the first 100 to sign up. First come, first served.
• Test results and GitHub checkins are public. This means your Git commit messages and test results will be visble to all. Source code is still private!

Learn about RunCodeRun and find out more on the RunCodeRun blog, FAQ, and getting started page.

Here at the Rails Rumble we’re big fans of OpenID. I’m not going to ramble on about why OpenID is important (I shouldn’t really need to) but if you’re building an application as part of the competition, just know that sites that support OpenID have an unfair advantage — all of the people judging your application are guaranteed to have an OpenID. They’re also unlikely to be real psyched about having to sign up for 100 different accounts in order to judge applications. And if you’re not careful this might end up reflected in your ratings.

Become an OpenID Consumer

Integrating OpenID support into your application doesn’t have to be hard. There are a couple of plugins that make it relatively easy. The classic Rails OpenID Authentication plugin (maintained by the core team) is probably the most well-known, and integrates pretty cleanly with pre-existing authentication systems with just a little bit of extra work. For an even simpler cookie-cutter solution, we’ve created the OpenID Simplified plugin, which combines the previously mentioned package and Rick Olson’s Authenticated System module to provide an uber-easy-to-use ready-bake solution. Of course, if you’re using a prefab Rails “blank slate” app like Bort, well that’s already got OpenID support baked in.

Providing OpenID

If you want to not only consume but also provide OpenID services to your users, the process isn’t quite as straightforward, and might involve integrating an OSS provider package like Masquerade. This probably isn’t something you’re going to want to or need to do during the competition, but as your app grows larger you may want the ability to offer your users branded OpenIDs if they don’t already have em, much like MySpace, Yahoo, and AOL do.

JanRain (the same people who created the ruby-openid gem) have just debuted a new SaaS product that makes offering users branded OpenIDs even easier, without the burden of running your own provider. If you came to the site without an OpenID and registered, you were taken to JanRain’s (MyOpenID) service, which created a branded OpenID for you (http://openid.railsrumble.com/your-username) and then redirected you back to us. This workflow is part of their new OPX service offering, which provides a hosted ASP model for OpenID providers. As a Rumble sponsor, they’ve been kind enough to provide these services to our users. Pretty cool, eh? There’s an API version of OPX available as well for even tighter integration. (Both products are subscription services and pricing varies by number of users)

Well, Kind of. We've just moved the 30 odd teams that were on the wait list to the competitors list and we've managed to open up 10 more time limited spots. What this means for you is that if you were wait listed before, you should've gotten an email letting you know you've been accepted. If you haven't signed up yet, registration closes in roughly a day so be quick.

Last year our pal Bryan Liles put together a great Rails Rumble primer screencast detailing host setup, configuration, and end to end Rails application deployment. People swooned over its awesomeness. It was really, really good.

Fortunately for you, he’s done it again this year, updating the content for the 2008 contest and including GitHub and Passenger. Check it out. And, as Bryan says, TATFT.

Just in case you all didn’t catch it, we’ve added some new participating companies and locations to the work share program:

• Indy Hall – Philadelphia, PA
• Linode – Absecon, NJ
• Spinbits – Dubai, United Arab Emirates

There are also office spaces available for teams in the following locations:

• Engine Yard – San Francisco, CA
• Thoughtbot – Boston MA
• New Leaders – Santa Barbara, CA
• Hashrocket – Jacksonville, FL
• EdgeCase – Columbus and Cincinatti, OH
• MadPilot – Perth, Western Australia

If your team is looking for a comfortable place to all work together for the Rumble, check out these locations and reserve your free space today!

Hey Rumblers! As we approach the start of the competition on 18 October, I wanted to draw your attention to a great, free resource to accelerate the development and debugging of your entries: HopToad by thoughtbot.

In a nutshell, HopToad is a free service that takes the core functionality of the popular exception_notifier plugin (collecting and mailing uncaught exceptions) and adds a healthy dose of awesome. Instead of your inbox filling with exception notifications, HopToad will collate, count duplicates, and present your application exceptions by project, controller action, line number, and exception type. Details on any exception are just a click away and you can hide an exception type by marking it resolved.

Identification of duplicate exceptions by HopToad is worth the price of admission (free!) by itself. But wait, there's more! The fine folks at thoughtbot also provide an RSS feed of your notifications, digest summaries delivered to your inbox, and a slick, XML-based RESTful API that you can use to inject your own notifications (conveniently wrapped up in the notify_hoptoad method of the HopToad Notifier plugin) or pull out collected notifications. A cool example of the API in action is Brian Cooke's Croak.app for OS X.

Installation

Installation of the HopToad Notifier plugin into your competition Rails app is super simple. Make sure you've signed up for an account and have an API key. Next, install the plugin via:

script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/hoptoad_notifier.git

You'll need to make some configuration changes in your app to start the flow of exceptions to HopToad. In config/initializers/hoptoad.rb:

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = 'your_api_key_here'
end

And in your ApplicationController:

include HoptoadNotifier::Catcher

Finally, you can test everything is working by sending a test notice to HopToad using:

rake hoptoad:test

... in your production environment.

Further Reading

Not yet convinced? Perhaps these fine links will sway you.

• Hoptoad: in Brief
• Ride the toad
• The community's hopping all over Hoptoad
• Hoptoad - Rails Exception Catching Made Easy
• Hoptoad (for Rails)
• Developer's Best Friend: Hoptoad

With this years upcoming Rails Rumble I thought I'd take this chance to write up some of my tips for taking part in the competition. I'm a new member of the RailsRumble organizational team this year after having competed as a solo team member in last years competition.

Read the rest of this entry

What an amazing week this has been for us here on the Rumble team. We opened registration just under a week ago and in the first 4 days alone all of our initial 200 seats were taken. In light of this, I thought it might be nice to share some of the stats for the competition so far.

Teams

This year, we've got 200 accepted teams (that is, those who are already confirmed to be competing) and another 14 on the waiting list. Of these teams, The majority (110) are solo whilst 50, 28 and 26 and teams have 2, 3 and 4 members respectively. We anticipate that a number of the solo teams will add members before the start of the competition, as solo teams were a minority last year. Please note that you'll need to do this before the start of the competition! There are also only 14 pending invites as of the moment.

Location wise, there is a huge mix of countries showing up, with the majority of entrants being in the USA. We also have teams from Germany, Finland, Canada, Morocco, Israel, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, VN, Russian Federation, Croatia, Poland, Brazil, Italy, Austria, France, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Serbia, Philippines, Belgium, Estonia, Canada, Thailand, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, México, Egypt and India.

OpenID Adoption and Users

One of the things that blew my mind was just how widely adopted OpenID is among our users. Before I get into the actual numbers, I'd like to note our choice only to support OpenID this year was fuelled by the teams belief it's an important part of making the competition less painful for voters and an excellent way to simplify the registration process for individual apps. Since every user participating in the Rumble (including voters) is guaranteed to have an OpenID now, they don't have to worry about signing up for a hundred different applications. Keep that in mind, developers, when you're building your applications.

With that in mind, of the 552 users (428 of whom are on a team), 443 of them already had pre-existing OpenID accounts. That's more than we expected, to be honest. Oh, and those that didn't already have an account are now the proud owners of an openid.railsrumble.com-branded OpenID, courtesy of our partners at Jan Rain (who operate the popular MyOpenID service).

What's to come

With all of that said and done, we've still got a long way to go. With the competition itself on in just a few weeks, we're looking forward to posting more stats post-competition. Until then, we'll be busy blogging about different aspects of the rumble so make sure you watch the blog.