Vinsol - Leading Ruby on Rails Development and Consulting Firm in India » rails plugins

‘Launching Soon’ – Helping Startups Build Online Identity Even before the Actual Launch

naveen — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 06:21:19 +0000

The process of brand building begins even before the actual website is launched. To have an eye-catching temporary ‘Launching Soon’ page can do a world of good for your online brand identity. It is the first step that lets you create initial buzz about your business and, therefore, it becomes imperative to have a dedicated ‘Launching Soon’ or ‘Coming Soon’ page in place. Needless to say that an aesthetic landing page embosses a long lasting and distinctive impression in the visitors’ psyche, ensuring a successful first step in climbing the long ladder.

Quick Introduction about ‘Launching Soon’

‘Launching Soon’ is a simple rails plugin that helps rails projects to manage a dedicated launching soon page before the actual launch date. The plugin also collects email from potential customers and can be integrated through an API to popular email marketing service providers like MailChimp & CampaignMonitor (to store customers email contacts). It lets you have a launch timer in place, and you can even have your company logo, about us section and much more. In a nutshell, all primary branding elements are present on your landing page (even before the launch of the official website). Exciting, isn’t it!

To hack over the excitement, ‘Launching Soon’ is an open source rails plugin which can be used by anyone & everyone to set up a fully customized and dedicated landing page in just a few minutes.

Why bother for a dedicated launch soon page?

Gone are the days when terrible yet oh so nostalgic ‘Under Construction’ animated GIF was appreciated by visitors. In its place, the use of more effective, functional and boiled down single ‘Coming Soon’ page is a cogent trend, capable of instantly satisfying the primary goals of the website owners.

For obvious reasons, there are other benefits of exerting efforts to have a great ‘Coming Soon’ page:

1.   Jumpstart your web presence – An effective landing page is the best way to ease the transition from going from naught to a full matured website launch.
2.   Engage with the visitors – Think from where you can benefit the most, a garish graphic which says coming soon or one page site that interacts with the visitors.
3.   Capture user data – This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of having a landing page. It lets you gather a database of genuinely interested users to whom you can send a newsletter notifying the release of your website. Big enough to help your site gain momentum.
4.   Search engine optimization – Getting a domain name booked is not enough. It is essential and imperative to have something substantial online immediately rather than wait for the final product.

With Launching Soon, it is possible to encompass all the above mentioned aspects without any rigorous development and design hassles. With a simple rails plug and play you would be up and running within minutes with your landing page, buzzing about your business and building an online identity. So, if you need a launching soon page then this is it…‘Launching Soon’ can be a near perfect solution.

Get the app code at:

https://github.com/vinsol/Launching-Soon

Note – Currently ‘Launching Soon’ works with only rails 2.x. We are working on its compatibility with rails 3.x and would keep you posted with the updates.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

New Ruby on Rails Plugin- Launching Soon has launched

manik — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:36:02 +0000

“Launching Soon” is a new plugin that VinSol has developed.

Working on client projects, we saw a pattern – the client owns a domain, which is either parked or has a blog running on it, and then they commission us to build an application. While the application is being developed, they want us to setup a landing page on the server, with a couple of links – to the blog etc. and want to capture email addresses of people who are interested in the service that the application would offer.

We actually found a few ready to use options for this. This php based paid script was one and there is also a free launching soon module in PHP/Jquery.

However, we did not find anything for Rails so Satish set out to write a plugin for it. Then we thought it would be good to integrate it with Campaign Monitor , since most of our clients use this service for running their email campaigns. And subsequently Satish extended it to add Mail Chimp integration also.

Give it a spin and send us your feedback via the LightHouse project.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ever tried Rails.root

Akhil Bansal — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:00:56 +0000

Guys, have you ever tried Rails.root. It gives same value as RAILS_ROOT. But now in edge rails it is modified and you can do much more with it.

You can use Rails.root at places like:

Both gives the same result.

Presented faceted search using ultrasphinx

Akhil Bansal — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:15:21 +0000

The first ruby funday held on 22nd Nov 2008 in New Delhi, India. I presented on faceted search using ultrasphinx. I also gave a live demo there. Here are the slides:

Facet Searching using Ultrasphinx

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sphinx ultrasphinx)

You can ask me if you have any doubt.

Hoptoad: A Rails Exception Handling Service

Administrator — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:31:17 +0000

Many of you guys(as me) may have used Exception Notifier plugin to get Rails app exceptions right into your mailbox, and may also have faced some problem like this.

Also if you have 2-3 or more apps running in production then managing such exception mails is also a big headache. In such case one have to keep track of many things like which type of error is resolved/unresolved for which project etc… .

So, here is a good news for those who don’t know about Hoptoad. It is an hosted service by thoughtbot which receives your exceptions, notify you once per error type by email and keep track(resolved/unresolved, count etc…) of your errors on project basis.

By now its a free service. I’m gonna use this as my next project goes live. What abt you??? ;-P

Rails Plugin Annotate Models For Spec And Spec Fixtures

Akhil Bansal — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:18:14 +0000

I have been using “Annotate Models” rails plugin written by Dave Thomas since I found it around one and half year ago. It really helps while writing fixtures. But if you use RSpec you might miss schema info at the top of your rspec fixture file as I do. So, today I modify the plugin file so that it prepends schema info to spec file and fixture file. Below are the links of patch file:

svn patch to add schema info to spec file and spec fixture file
git patch to add schema info to spec file and spec fixture file

Acts_as_solr: Starting solr server on windows

Akhil Bansal — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:54:40 +0000

I was using acts_as_searchable for one of my project, which uses Hyperestraier in background. Yesterday I decided to use acts_as_solr which uses solr(based on Lucene Java search library). I did all written in its Manual/Readme, but when I issued

to start the solr server, it threw a heart breaking “Bad file descriptor” error, although acts_as_solr was working fine on one of my colleague’s linux machine.

I started digging around this and found that there is an issue in rake task that starts the solr server. Actually the problem was this rake task uses ‘fork’ which is not available on windows, also it only handles ‘ECONNREFUSED’ exception which is actually “Connection Refused” error raised by ruby on linux. But in windown it throws ‘EBADF’ which is “Bad file descriptor” error raised by ruby on windows.

So below is the hack for that:

Just add this to vendor/plugins/acts_as_solr/lib/taks/solr.rake, and start solr server on windows by issuing

Careful while using Exception Notifier Plugin

Akhil Bansal — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:31:17 +0000

Exception Notifier Plugin can make you crazy as it made me yesterday.

Let me explain, I was using this plugin for one of my project and our server got a DOS attack. We were requested some URLs that doesn’t exists, like http://somedomain.com/game.rar etc… . I had registered my gmail account to get notifiers. And due to this attack I was sent around 7631*61 mails in 10 hrs. This made me crazy, because I was unable to receive any other email as (may be) my queue was busy with receiving notifier mails. Then gmail started bouncing back those mails saying “The Gmail user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered. Please resend your message at a later
time”. And then it became a loop, Gmail-My Server-Gmail.

I found 303552 mails in postfix queue of my server. That were ready to send to gmail. Now my first priority was to clean that postfix queue, so I did it by issuing “sudo postsuper -d ALL”. I hope to receive mails ASAP, It is now more than 48 hrs i received any genuine mail.

So I request you to be careful while using this plugin ;-)

Note: Since my gmail account not receiving mails, so please sent it to akhil at vinsol dot com

Plugin: Exception Notifier; Get detail information of exceptions occurred on the live server right on your inbox.

Akhil Bansal — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 09:47:17 +0000

I don’t know whether you guys are aware of Exception Notifier plugin written by Jamis Buck or not. If you don’t then I would like to share this with you.

The Exception Notifier plugin provides a mailer object and a default set of templates for sending email notifications when errors occur in a Rails application. The plugin is configurable and allows programmers to specify:

the sender address of the email
the recipient addresses
the text used to prefix the subject line

The email includes information about the current request, session, and environment, and also gives a backtrace of the exception.

I am using this plugin and found it very useful, and suggest you to use it.

You can get this plugin from http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/exception_notification/

Ajax based drag drop and sortable tree for Rails

Akhil Bansal — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:06:35 +0000

My friend sur wrote and shares his code for Ajax based drag drop sortable tree for rails. He is also trying to pluginize this, and soon it will be publicly available. Find more detail here.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.