rowtheboat

I’ve just pushed two plugins to github. The first is an improvement on the standard Defensio plugin that only checks the validity of your API key when posting articles or comments. This is better than checking each time a model that uses the plugin is instantiated as it doesn’t require contact with the Defensio API (so is faster) and also won’t bring your site to a standstill if someone is just viewing a page and the Defensio service is down.

The second updates the highly useful timed fragment cache plugin by Richard Livsey to support Rails 2.1

For the last 6 weeks I’ve been head deep coding for a new startup wordia.com The idea is rather fresh - to allow people to learn the meaning of words by watching videos of people saying what the word means to them. So far my favourites include invention by Nikki Grahame of big brother fame, bannana by two randoms at Edinburgh festival and, as everybody looked up rude words when they first got access to a real dictionary, incest.

It’s been a really hard few work so was very rewarding on launch day (after 4.5 hours of sleep) to see London’s press arrive at our launch event (see photo left). The site went down well and we featured in most the major newspapers in the following days. It was also great to meet our backer Michael Birch in person having recently exited from Bebo

In the coming months we’ve lot of new features planned and exciting people lined up to film with. I’ll also be dropping back down to 3 days per week so I can get working on my own projects again. It should be an exciting 3 months.