'Launching Soon' – Helping Startups Build Online Identity Even before the Actual Launch
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.
New Ruby on Rails Plugin- Launching Soon has launched
"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.
Ever tried Rails.root
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:
as
Both gives the same result.
Presented faceted search using ultrasphinx
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:
You can ask me if you have any doubt.
Hoptoad: A Rails Exception Handling Service
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
Update: Hoptoad was re-branded to Airbrake Bug Tracker