All the latest Bit Zesty news, straight from the team.
Whilst searching for a gem/plug-in to help with storing encrypted notes in a Rails app, I came across strongbox. It uses public key encryption to encrypt and store data on an ActiveRecord attribute – Spike has a great writeup on his blog. One limitation I…
Last week, we hosted a lunchtime Q&A session on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at THECUBE. SEO is a process which online businesses can use to maximise their site’s visibility on search engines, and our co-workers had plenty of tips and experiences to share about it….
In the run-up to the 2010 general election in UK, there have been a few high-profile instances of political parties asking their supporters for ideas. Specifically, Labour and the Liberal Democrats invited theirs to submit ideas for campaign posters, while the Conservatives asked the public…
I gave a talk at NoSQL EU on a few of the different types of NoSQL solutions we’ve used in the past, explaining why we’d chosen each one and how they had worked for us. It was a bit tough to do with a cold,…
We recently built a Ruby on Rails application that was receiving a large amount of XML. This as you can imagine was pretty CPU intensive, especially as Rails (ActiveSupport) uses REXML under the bonnet to parse the incoming requests. I started to wonder if it…
Last week I gave a talk at Google OSJam on Raphaël, a javascript SVG library that makes it easy to draw and animate vector graphics on a browser. SVG is one of the many methods of drawing images on the web. Some of the other…
I’m sure we’ve all heard the pros & cons of the NoSQL movement so these will not be covered here. I’ve been experimenting with a number of alternatives to RDBMS for a while such as CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Redis and recently MongoDB. MongoDB (from “humongous”) is…
I am quite excited about the rising popularity of document stores. We have been using MongoDB and CouchDB for some time now, both for internal and client projects. Both databases are similar (although built on different technologies) as they are schema-free, scalable, and document-oriented. The…
It‘s amazing how many things can go wrong during the course of a web project if you don’t have a good team in control. Here, we focus on five problems which any project can encounter, and explore how – in our experience – they can…