Jake Howerton

Hey! I am moving everything over to a webby built site and will be experimenting a bit. I plan to update this post with some details on the setup and tips for going through this process. In the meantime everything here is public on github.

I just did a presentation at nyc.rb on integrating multiple rails apps:

When One App Is Not Enough

Here are some links to the projects I mentioned ( let me know if I am missing any):

multi_app_routing (http://github.com/jakehow/mutli_app_routing)
braid (http://github.com/evilchelu/braid)
supervisord (http://supervisord.org)
monit (http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/)
god (http://github.com/mojombo/god)
bj (http://github.com/atmos/bj)
starling (http://github.com/starling/starling)
beanstalkd (http://xph.us/software/beanstalkd/)
auto_cron (http://github.com/fhwang/auto_cron)
sinatra (http://github.com/bmizerany/sinatra)
halcyon (http://github.com/mtodd/halcyon)
merb (http://github.com/wycats/merb-core)

Ok, so there is a huge thread over at the Highrise Customer forums in regards to a feature that a lot of people feel is insufficient.

In Highrise, you can create and assign tasks to yourself, or other team members. This is great because you will get an email at the beginning of the day and right before a task is due, telling you to do it. I was thinking of using this for our sales staff and letting the receptionists set sales appointments for the sales people.

However, tasks are severely limited. You can only see tasks that you have created. This means that if you work on a team of people the feature is near worthless for time specific tasks(like meetings) if receptionist A sets an appointment for Salesperson A, Receptionist B has no way of finding this out and can double book the Salesperson A’s schedule.

After bitching about it yesterday on their forums like everyone else, I took an hour to do my PDI duties today and came up with a hack that lets you sync meetings into Google Calendar. It is an ugly hack however and hopefully 37signals will mitigate this issue sooner rather than later.

What I have done is instructed the receptionists to use only the notes feature for these types of meetings. They are entering the data like so:

Meeting @ Location
For: users@emailaddress.com
10/12/07 @ 6pm
Notes: anything you want here

So I went to implement it and hit another roadblock… There is no way to get all notes in the API, so for now I am going to put it on a cron job and get the atom feed.

Things you need:

sudo gem install icalendar
sudo gem install atom

Get gcalendar.rb here

I dont have this in production yet, but I think basically all you would have to change is, implementing LAST_CHECKED constant however you feel best.