So this weekend was a great weekend for the site. Made a lot of progress. Finished up the first run at user profiles, favorites, location reviews, and content flagging.

Nothing public yet. I want to implement the “I’m Going!” feature, friends, basic photo galleries and do a bunch of testing. Once that is done I am going to push it all live for a first run. ETA? Being realistic, this looks like a busy week so it probably won’t happen until mid-march.

update (3/14): A first version of the “I’m Going” feature is in place. Needs a lot of polish as does everything else, but I am just trying to burn through as many features as I can without getting too bogged down. My goal is to launch as soon as possible with a minimal working feature-set. I have already been seduced into adding more features then I wanted to originally prior to launch.

Still have “friends” and a basic photo gallery system to do before launch.

Flying to Jacksonville from thurs-sat for a client meeting so it’s going to be a busy week, we’ll see how I make out.

It was announced today that Measuremap was bought out by Google.

This is especially interesting because it never even got out of a closed alpha test.

I signed up for the service a couple weeks ago, I never got an invite to try it out though. Basic jist of it that I got was blog hit and stat tracking on steroids.

Measuremap was being created by the folks at Adaptive Path (remember them? these are the same guys that cointed that damned AJAX term which helped jumpstart all this “web2.0” business)

This is also the first big buyout of a ruby / rails based application I’m aware of. Too bad they didnt disclose the price… Any guesstimates?

People may be surprised Measuremap was bought this early, but I think it makes a lot of sense. The Adaptive Path guys don’t have to worry about competing with the powerhouse that is google analytics (urchin), and google gets some great talent at (what I assume was) a reasonable price.

Read about it here…

A common need in ybg is the ability to be plot different models (users, bars, restaurants, neighborhoods) on a map.

I think this common functionality would be useful as a rails plugin and I am working on packaging it up into a new plugin called acts_as_mappable.

The goal of this plugin is to abstract away grabbing an address and retrieving geocode information. I’ll see if I can fit in distance calculations also.

Getting my rails sites up and deployed with lighttpd took a bit of time and research.

Lighttpd: The painless way is the essential guide and is just plain awesome. These tidbits here are mainly for my own reference, but they may prove useful.

With a bit of mucking around, I was able to get multiple rails apps on multiple domains hosted on my one textdrive account.

These are the steps I took…

So apparently Origami doesn’t like the latest release of Typo so reading articles is broken. Working on a fix…

In the meantime I’m using the vanilla typo layout.