Following up on Alex MacCaw’s post on collaborative filtering. The plugin we recently released acts_as_recommendable allows Rails developers to quickly add some user-driven recommendations of items to their latest great millionaire-making startup. At Made By Many we’ve been developing some great niche social-media Ruby On Rails sites recently with New Bamboo and Headshift. The new edge of social media is in the maths, commenting and rating is so old-school, it’s what you do with that data that counts.

This is going to be a tutorial for simple integration of acts_as_recommendable to recommend your users some books.

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A few weeks ago I was quoted in a New Media Age article about Ruby On Rails and the London agency market (available online for subscribers) and it’s worth following up a few things, especially on Made By Many’s involvement with Rails.

At Made By Many we like to remain technology agnostic, which is why we don’t have a large team of developers. We feel this benefits us and our clients more by not overly invested in one thing that limits our creative output and may not be the best solution for our clients. This enables us to consult on the whole range of technology strategies and lets us play with best technologies around.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have some favorites, and those are delivering massive benefits for our clients and fit with the creative work and processes we adopt. Is this regard Ruby On Rails has been a fantastic choice for some of the projects we have been working on, and it’s for the same reasons that Alex MacCaw and I have been so involved with it for the past few years.

The creative solutions we architect and design are geared towards delivering bespoke functionality, exciter/delighter features and unique social propositions. This, combined with a strategy to release early and iterate, means we need development speed and a flexible framework. Working with Rails has given that and we have used it ourselves on a number of smaller projects as well as working with partners on three big new social media sites.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy but we have been working with some real experts in New Bamboo and combining agile design and agile development approaches. The on-going issue with Rails is around effective and scalable deployment, Ruby itself it not as fast as other languages and Rails has seen some bloat slowing it down. This means you do need some expertise in creating some scalable applications, but with some prudent caching strategies and the beauty of memcached it’s more than possible. In the medium term these problems will disappear with Ruby 1.9, Enterprise Ruby and Rubinius making Ruby faster and continual Rails optimisations.

I still believe that to get the best of Rails you need some experts, otherwise you’ll never see the flexibility and speed of the technology applied. We are seeing more and more calls for Rails developers and with firms such as the BBC, Endemol, Channel 4 and EMI already on Rails there is going to be a greater need. Hopefully we can continue to get great development expertise in London rather than see RoR degenerate to the state of PHP hacking (not that there aren’t some top-natch PHP outfits out-there).

I think we’ll be working with Rails for a while but we are still working with PHP, Flex, AIR and lots of JQuery as well, but in the future we’ll be looking to work with the best technology around for our clients and our own projects.

Here at Made By Many we are technology agnostic. Primarily because we believe a client should use the best technology solutions to fit them and fit the problem we are trying to solve. We work with lots of in-house technology teams and out-sourced partners for clients, offering technology consultancy wrapped into a holistic offering on next-generation website problems.

That’s not to say we don’t have technology preferences. With all things being equal for greenfield deployments we can work with the best technology to do the job. That’s why we have delivered several solutions using Ruby On Rails and use Wordpress for delivering blog solutions, such as this one.

I’ve spent some time making Wordpress deployments as easy as Ruby On Rails using the excellent Capistrano, this also lets me control environments which are hosting both Wordpress and Ruby On Rails in the same way.

Capistrano 2, while built for Ruby On Rails, can be used as a generic deployment tool with a little work. It adds capabilities to open-source infrastructures which were previously only available to things like high-end J2EE application servers. Here are some of the things to make Wordpress deployments with Capistrano.

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I love online cartoons. I’ve always been a fan of penny-arcade, pvponline and userfriendly. Since offline media began, monks have been scribing illustrations in margins and the newspaper cartoonist has been an institution in expressing the zeitgeist. Now several web2.0 startups like such as Toondo and Pixton let you create your own.

I like Toonlet which is so straightforward but allows for some cool looking comics. Here’s one I created earlier:

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