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I just implemented a new way of uploading assets such as photos and PDF-files to Lokalebasen.dk. There is nothing revolutionary about it, but I hit a few snags on the way, and I thought I’d share my choices here.

Lokalebasen (a Danish website for rental and sale of business property) is (of course) based on Ruby on Rails and uses the notoriously brilliant jQuery as Javascript framework. When the customer asked for a progress bar while uploading assets, I knew there was basically two choices: Polling the server for the progress of the upload, or uploading through Flash. I choose the last option because I believe it is easier to implement, and it gives the added bonus of being able to start the upload in an “ajaxy” way without refreshing the page.

Several ready-made solutions exists, and chose one that was built as a jQuery plugin, was updated recently and was easy to use while being highly configurable: Uploadify. This article is not an Uploadify tutorial – you’ll have to work the out from the documentation and the examples. Rather, it’s about the last piece of the puzzle, how to make Rails play nicely with Uploadify.

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I have been in a relationship with Ruby on Rails for more than 3 years, and I’ve completely dedicated and faithful to the beautiful web framework for almost 2 years. Until now.

Today I decided to cheat on Rails. And I’m not talking going back to the ugly ex, ASP.NET, or getting back in touch with old flirts such as PHP or Java, no … Once you go Ruby, you don’t go back.

But there are other Ruby web frameworks than Rails. “What? I thougth Ruby was invented for Rails, as a kind of unintentional side effect?” you might say, but it is no so. Until recentl, Merb has probably been the most well-known “Ruby-based framework that is not Rails”, but now the two are getting hitched and as such we have to look elsewhere for alternative Ruby frameworks.

Webby is one such framework. Or to be fair, Webby is so much less than both Rails and Merb, and that’s the whole point. Webby are for simple, static home pages that can be hosted on anywhere. The Ruby framework generates static html files based on layouts and content pieces defined in the project. It doesn’t use a database, it doesn’t parse forms and that is exactly the simplicity you sometimes need.

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© 2009 Rasmus Luckow

We were all there. The geeks, the journalists, the communication and new media consultants and the Internet entrepreneurs. Copenhagen Twestival was my first experience of meeting the Twitter community, and my guess is it was probably also the largest gathering of Danish Twitter users to date – we were around 120 people. Turns out that the Danish tweet-crowd consists of many well known faces from gatherings such as Copenhagen Ruby Brigade, Barcamp Copenhagen and Reboot.

Copenhagen Twestival was, along with many other similar meetings around the world, a charity event with the purpose of raising money for charity:water – an organization that argues that clean drinking water is the essential foundation upon which developing countries can evolve into something better. I can’t claim that I suffer from any great social conscience, but when Maame Agyeben – a former intern with the organization – told about charity:water, I was truly impressed. Their administration costs is sponsored separately, which makes them able to say that 100% of the general donations goes to building wells.

Red Cross and other global help organizations are doing a great job, but I like the prospects of charity organizations with a more narrow and dedicated purpose being able to pursue their cause globally by innovative use of Internet services. That night, we generated DKK 5,000 from the sale of 500 lottery tickets to win donated gifts, and probably a similar amount from buying overpriced, donated drinks.

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