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Collection of blog posts on drupal, ruby on rails, open source, social trends and startup life.

OmniAuth for external authentication with rails
Posted on : Nov 17, 2010

Omniauth is a pretty simple solution if you want your users to authenticate using oauth and openid providers. Its based on the principle that 

Every authentication system can essentially be boiled down into two "phases".

  1. Request phase : we request information from the user that is necessary to complete authentication. This information may be POSTed to a URL or performed externally through an authentication process such as OpenID.
  2. Callback phase : In the Callback Phase, we receive an authenticated unique identifier that can differentiate this user from other users of the same authentication system. Additionally, we may provide user information that can be automatically harvested by the application to fill in the details of the authenticating user.

Omniauth doesn't handle your session, it mainly focuses on bringing you the required data from the provider and its upto you to manage the session. You can

rubyonrails
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Drush - drupal productivity messiah
Posted on : Jun 30, 2010

Drush is a shell and command line interface for drupal where in you can do 90% of the routine tasks quicker; whether you are maintaining or developing a site. Drush is such an indispensable tool that you can really break down your developer experience in two ages: BD (before Drush) and AD (After Drush). If you were lured by a module in BD age, the drill was something like:

  1. Find the module project page.
  2. Choose the correct module version number.
  3. Download or checkout (CVS) the correct module version.
  4. Place the module directory into your sites/all/modules (or wherever).
  5. Locate the module amidst the long list at admin/build/modules page.
  6. Choose the module and install it.

This experience often made me feel like a click zombie and my development environment and methodologies as a den of time suckage. Really there are more sadistic drills in the

#Drupal
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Dont out-spend, out-teach your competition
Posted on : Jun 01, 2010

A snippet from a DHH talk on entepreneurship at Stanford where he emphasises that instead of trying to outspend your competition in advertising, to build a sustainable business you should rather build an audience by educating about your product and your company. A DHH Jewel. You can watch the entire talk here.

 

#Startup
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Essential elements of a social networking site
Posted on : Apr 15, 2010

Its probably a moot point to suggest that social networking sites are the rage these days. Thanks to the success of facebook, twitter, myspace and orkut, most of the sites now have a strong social component to them. So is the social networking space overcrowded? Maybe, but dont let that discourage you. As we pointed out in a previous blog post there's still a lot of scope here. So what makes a social networking site successful ? What are the key components and features that a social networking site should have. We at qed42 are web dwellers and continuously trying to deconstruct the web and we have the answer for you. The essential elements which you should keep in mind while building a social networking site.

 

  1. Registration Form : Keep your registration form as simple as possible.
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Potential of location based services
Posted on : Jan 17, 2010

Its almost paradoxical that the internet, that helped in making the world a smaller place has local as its next major focus area, but there has been a spate of activity in the local internet space in the last year which seems to suggest so. While this space has seen a lot of new services coming up, even the established players are trying to a get a piece of the local pie.

One of the most talked about startup of last year was foursquare. It is a hybrid between a social game and a city guide. You discover interesting places in your city and share it with your friends. It adds the gaming aspect by awarding you points and badges for going to your favorite hangout spots. It already has the early adopters hooked and bloggers like robert scoble,

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Kaal - Drupal 6 theme
Posted on : Dec 20, 2009

Kaal is a port of a wordpress theme to drupal. A pro-blogger theme which can have "ads" in the blog. It is a three column theme which you can use for your blog. It uses Blueprint CSS framework. This is a sub theme of drupal's blueprint project. So please download and install the blueprint base theme (follow the install instructions for installing blueprint as base theme) if you chose to install kaal as sub theme. We have also provided an option to download it as a standalone theme. 


Features
  • Three column
  • Fixed width
  • It has two sidebars,a AD's sidebar which can be used to display AD's with a right sidebar.
  • Its tableless which makes it light weight.
  • Uses blueprint CSS
#Drupal
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Niche Social Networks – Why do they matter?
Posted on : Oct 16, 2009

In the deluge of news about twitter, facebook and other social networks behemoths like MySpace we often fail to take into account the power of domain specific or niche social networks. What are they? – They are social networks which involve people with the same interest and these networks revolve around this interest. They operate on the principle that if you bring people with a similar interest together the selling will take care of itself. Let’s take a look at some of them.

LinkedIn can be put into this category as it’s a social network with the purpose of business networking for professionals. Wayn is a lifestyle and travel social network with a stated aim of uniting travellers all over the world. Then there is classmates.com

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