Bloggy Hell

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Business Review Weekly released it’s list of top 100 Australian web 2.0 lists today and 88 Miles came in at number 58!

There are some pretty cool apps on the list, including big players like Atlassian and of course our good friends Saasu.com, Scouta and Norg Media.

Rounding up the Perth list we have The broth, Minit, Buzka, Gooruze.

Congratulations to everyone who made the list!

An online version of the list can be seen here.

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On Saturday I posted that 88 Miles was profiled on the Startups Carnival run by VS Consulting. Well, the results are out now, and 88 Miles came a extremely respectable 4th from 28 entries!

A big congratulations to Richard at Scouta for taking out the first prize and to GoodBarry and Suburb View for rounding out the top three.

Also hats off to OurWishingWell, who shared fourth place with 88 Miles.

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VS Consulting Group has been running an online startups carnival over the past two-weeks, profiling 28 up and coming Australian startups.

Today, 88 Miles is profiled.

It is well worth checking out some of the other entrants, including fellow West Australian Scouta.

A big thanks to Vishal for putting on such an “event” — it really goes to show that the SaaS-o-sphere is alive and well over here in Australia!

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Now that the OAuth standard has been finalised and the Rails plugin (as well as libraries for a number of other languages) has stablised, I thought it time to become an early adopter and add it to 88 Miles.

OAuth works like this:

1. A developer create a third-party application (a consumer). They login to the the provider website and add their application. The website will then given them a secret key and three URLs: one to get a request token, one to get an access token and one that users can use to authorize an application.
2. When another user decides to use the third-party application, they first need to authorize it’s use. So the application will request a Request Token by posting some data to the request token URL.
3. Once this returns, the application should redirect, or at least point to the authorization URL. On this page, the user is asked whether they really want to give access to the third party application.
4. If the user says yes, the provider will redirect the user back to the consumer website, or at least notify the user that the consumer has authorization (It’s a bit hard to redirect to a desktop application for example).
5. Once the consumer is notified that it has been given access, it will then swap it’s Request Token for an Access Token.
6. Now the consumer can freely access resources from the provider by using this Access Token.

Obviously, if a given instance of an application has a valid Access Token, it can skip steps 1-5, and just continue using the Access Token.

Although the Rails plugin is aimed at people using acts_as_authenticated, a little bit of hacking and code diving meant it was relatively easy to shoe-horn it into my custom login system. Because I wanted 88 Miles to drop-back to basic authentication if OAuth wasn’t available, I needed to work out what authentication system each request required. This can be done by:

request_proxy = OAuth::RequestProxy.proxy(request)
if(request_proxy.signature_method != nil)
  # It's an OAuth request
  if oauthenticate
    # They get access
  else
    # Denied!
  end
end

Nice and easy. I did go through and spruce up some of the authentications screens, but if you aren’t that anal, the boilerplate code from the plugin would suffice.

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For the past couple of months, I’ve been slaving away prepping the next version of 88 Miles, my simple time tracking application and now, I can happily announce it is alive! There are heaps of new features, and bug fixes, including a migration to Rails 2, a migration to a new server as well some dabbling in the wonderful world of Rails plugins. Some of the features are below:

Saasu.com integration

Many people have been asking for invoicing from 88 Miles, but since it is really outside of where I’d like to see 88 Miles go (The strap line is Simple time tracking for a reason) so Saasu | The web finance engine to the rescue! I wrote the the Rails plugin that talks to Saasu.com, and I’ll be releasing it shortly after making a few cleanups (There are some parts of the API I’m not using in 88 Miles that are still a little rough around the edges). The plugin will allow users to sync companies and contacts as will as create invoices straight from their timesheets. I’m pretty excited by this feature.

OpenID support

88 Miles is now OpenID aware, so you can use your third-party OpenID to login to 88 Miles. Just between you and me, OAuth will be coming soon (as soon as the rails plugin and ruby library settle).

New REST endpoints

There has been quite a bit of work on the REST API — it should now be much more consistent (i.e the data that the server sends and the data that the server expects is the same). I’ve also removed the /api in the endpoint URL, as it was becoming a nightmare to maintain.

New Server

Finally, the biggest change is our new server! We have moved over to a Joyent accelerator, which are specifically tuned to the Ruby on Rails platform. This means everything will be quicker. The old Media Temple server, whilst great didn’t really allow for much customisation, and with the Christmas special of two years for the price of one, it was kind of hard to pass up.

It’s been a fun ride - this project is always a great learning experience for me - and it helps that there are others out there that like it. Go and try it out if you haven’t before (or even if you have)