Rework, by 37signals.
Posted by thatsinthebook on 24th May 2010
37signals, creator of online tools such as Basecamp and Highrise (both used by pebble.it), is one of pebble.it’s long term sources of inspiration. Their ethos towards business and obvious success is compelling to say the least. Their new book, Rework, gives a fantastic look at their thoughts on business and why going against convention may be the way to go. It also serves as some great inspiration for people to get off their asses and make a change.
The main themes of the book are very refreshing and make complete sense - especially if there has always been “something” about conventional business that didn’t seem quite right to you. We have been implementing a set of these themes (listed below) and over the coming weeks will be writing a few more posts to share our experiences of them. In terms of progress, so far so good!
- Small Giants - happiness and profit before growth.
- Everything is Marketing - project your brand and culture with everything that you do.
- Say No! - take on the right business, not all business, and stick to what you enjoy and are good at.
- Have an Enemy - in our case, ‘big’ IT companies & PCs (oh, and Blackberries!).
- Leave the Competition - obsession with competitors can stifle your own success.
- Share - we solve and create - bearing all can only serve to help get the word out that your are awesome.
- Build an Audience - who enjoys cold selling anyway?!
One criticism is that Rework does, especially in the middle, mildly comes across as preaching only what has specifically worked for 37signals as a software product provider. Also, towards the end of the book, I did start to recall sections from their last book, “Getting Real”, (although this is hardly surprising).
Overall Rework is an inspirational book for those looking at starting out or small businesses that need some clarity and focus in their operations. Rework could also be a great tool for bigger businesses to tone down some of their more archaic corporate ways and maybe bring in some efficiencies.
Worth a read: Amazon.
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Fetching and caching Google Calendar data in Rails
Posted by shapeshed on 21st May 2010
Recently we had a requirement to show Google Calendar data for a client on a Rails intranet project. The requirements were a bit outside what’s offered by the embedded iFrame option so we needed a better solution to retrieve Google calendar data.
Options for getting data from Google Calendar
The simplest option is just to use the iFrame that Google provide that is accessible from your Google Calendar under Settings > Calendars > Name of your Calendar > Embed This Calendar. You don’t really get to customise this though so what you see is what you get
If you want the raw data so you can do things with it Google publish the gdata-ruby-util Ruby library which provides an interface into Google’s Data APIs. This is a very useful gem, providing full access to lots of data across Google services. From a Ruby perspective it seemed like you need to write a lot of code for a simple API call.
Better for our requirments was the GCal4Ruby gem that provides a clean interface to Google Calendar data. It works for both Google and Hosted Accounts and with just six lines of ruby you can get event data for a particular calendar:
service = GCal4Ruby::Service.new
service.authenticate("USERNAME", "PASSWORD")
cal = GCal4Ruby::Calendar.find(
service,
'YOUR_CALENDAR',
{:scope => :first}
)
events = GCal4Ruby::Event.find(
cal,
"",
{
:range => {:start => Time.parse("08/04/2000"),
:end => Time.parse("09/04/2010")}
}
)
Once you’ve got the data you can iterate over it as you want
for event in events
#do stuff here
puts event.title
end
Caching
The API call takes a while to come back so we don’t really want the user experience to be impacted by slow load times. We can use Rails caching to store the response and only fetch it when we need to. We put this into a rake task so that we could call it using a cron script to keep the calendar up to date
task :gcal_update => :environment do
Rails.cache.delete('gcal_events')
Rails.cache.fetch('gcal_events') {
gservice = GCal4Ruby::Service.new
gservice.authenticate("USERNAME", "PASSWORD")
calendar = GCal4Ruby::Calendar.find(gservice, 'your calendar', {:scope => :first})
events = GCal4Ruby::Event.find(calendar, "", {
:range => {:start => Time.now.beginning_of_day, :end => Time.now.advance(:days => 7)},
:singleevents => true,
:max_results => 1000,
:sortorder => "ascending" })
upcoming_events = {}
# We're saving the next 7 days of events
days = Date.today..Date.today.advance(:days => 7)
# initialize the hash
days.each{ |day| upcoming_events["#{day.to_s}"] = []
}
events.each do |e|
# should find out if its an all day event or a recurring event.
event = Hash.from_xml(e.to_xml)["entry"]
days.each do |day|
current_event = {}
if (event["when"]["startTime"].to_date <= day) and (event["when"]["endTime"].to_date >= day)
# save useful data into a hash
current_event["all_day"] ||= event["when"]["startTime"].to_time.to_date < event["when"]["endTime"].to_time.to_date ? true : false
current_event["title"] = event["title"]
current_event["uri"] = event["link"][0]["href"]
current_event["time"] = event["when"]["startTime"].to_time.strftime('%H:%M') if event["when"]["startTime"].to_date == event["when"]["endTime"].to_date
upcoming_events["#{day.to_s}"].push(current_event)
end
end
end
upcoming_events
}
end
Showing the calendar
Now in our controller we have an easy way to get the latest calendar data and we can then loop over it in our view
@calendar = Rails.cache.read('gcal_events')
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