After a turbo-charged 48 hour development period, our contest entry has launched! Keith did an outstanding job on our interface, far exceeding merely doing justice to my application code. Even more impressive, we managed to implement everything we intended, and simplified the app at the same time.

Here’s the short list of features:

• *No* Account Management Required!
• Easy to share private URLs
• Document Version & Status Tracking
• Version specific Comments

I would argue that our greatest success was removing the account management requirement. Most of the Rumble contest sites we’ve viewed so far put the majority of their content behind a login/password screen. A few of the more generous ones support OpenID, a technology I’ve recently come to embrace.

We take pride in being one of the few applications that offers all the benefit of a session-backed user account without any of the account creation/management overhead. Simply provide your name and email address when you upload a document and your account is created for you. If you’ve uploaded additional documents with the same email address, we’ll automatically group them together for you.

Well, I’m long overdue for a Rumble update, the past 24 hours have been a whirlwind of activity over at team Redkey. Our application now supports team collaboration, ActionMailer backed email, and some really cool routing stuff that enables us to use the concept of users without the overhead of making those users log in.

Also, don’t forget to check out our Flickr photos. We were fortunate enough to have a guest photographer stop by the morning to take our official team photo, capturing us at our most-rested state in the past day and a half.

Well, we’re just past the 14 hour mark since the Rails Rumble opened, and we’re making great progress. Keith Medlin and I have resurrected the “Red Key” brand to bring our revolutionary vision to life: Docustackr, a web-based document revision system.

The bulk of my time so far has been spent setting up our deployment environment, having done this recently for Alloy Code and Your Garage Online, I was able to speed through most of it. We’re using Mongrel, Capistrano and Nginx on Ubuntu 7.04 (breaking from the Debian herd) and have our stack already in place. We won’t be struggling to deploy at the last minute!

Keith has been focusing on our design and interface while I’ve been putting the models in place to support the site. We’ve snapped a few photos for posterity.

Keep watching for previews of our design and code process!

Alloy Code is thrilled to announce the launch of a new web application. Your Garage Online can help you manage everything from your vehicle's routine maintenance to those major and minor repairs.

Features

• Virtual garage to store your cars, including year, color, make, model, license and vehicle identification number data.
• Searchable repair forms to look up any repair or maintenance record, regardless of when or where it was performed.
• Comprehensive service history outlines work done by professional shops or in your own back yard.

YourGarageOnline.com was originally conceived as a Rails Day activity, but grew in scope beyond the confines of a single, 24 hour development project. The site was designed, coded and tested over a six week period, as an off-hours personal project and proof of concept application. The finished product serves as a demonstration of the quality and craftsmanship Alloy Code can deliver for our clients.

The site is coded in Ruby on Rails, using RESTful application design and leveraging cutting edge Web 2.0 technology.