Our latest release, Protect The Human, a social campaigning platform developed for Amnesty International’s UK division, marks an important milestone in Made by Many’s life. It’s nearing our first birthday and on the back of the private beta release of Metrotwin, we quietly released Protect The Human to the world on Tuesday.

Today is the first day that the wider world’s attention will be drawn to Protect The Human as it sees the release of tickets for Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball and the announcement from the High Court that evidence from Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed is admissible in his case to escape the death penalty. His case has been highlighted by Amnesty’s Individuals at Risk campaign for the past few years. (You can help raise awareness of his plight by taking action on Protect The Human.)

The juxtaposition of these two events is classic Amnesty: the tricky balance of important human rights issues with the lighter side of life; and Made by Many, in collaboration with our Ruby on Rails development partner New Bamboo, are very proud to have played a part in helping Amnesty get the message out to the wider population.

We worked very closely with Amnesty to define their online campaigning needs and ambitions before entering into a period of service definition to flesh out exactly what the site would do and how. The close relationship with Amnesty and New Bamboo continued throughout the project’s design and development. We’re looking forward to the future as Amnesty’s commitment to the web as an additional campaigning channel grows.

The site was built over an intensive 3-month period using Agile project, design and development methodologies (more of which we’ll reveal in a future blog post) and in true Agile style, the site will continue to be improved with iterative releases. Keep an eye on the site (and this blog) for release of more features over the coming weeks.

So what can you do on Protect The Human? Well, you can share, comment on and bookmark content from around the web to spread the word about human rights issues that matter to you.

And you can show your support by contributing the smallest action. What we’re aiming to do is to encourage more people to get involved with human rights without banging the drum and coming over all heavy-handed.

Your contribution can be as quick as a comment on a video, gallery or bookmark you’ve seen on Protect The Human. Or you could send it to a friend. For anyone who wants to spend a little more time, users can add their own bookmarks, create their gallery of images or upload a video relating to human rights.

We anticipate that the site will significantly contribute to Amnesty UK’s target to engage with 1 million people by 2011.

Stay tuned for a case study on the project with more detail on how we worked together with both Amnesty and New Bamboo.

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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