Mappam Launch - Location based advertising is here

This morning, ZXV Ltd launched Mappam, a new location based advertising service that makes it easy to put your ads on the map.

As an advertiser, you can visit mappam.com and place an advert, upload an icon to represent your ad and chose the price-per-click. You only pay when Mappam redirects someone to your site. As a host, you can add Mappam adverts to your site with one line of Javascript. Mappam ads appear as small 16×16 pixel icons on your map - taking up far less space than traditional banner ads and providing information that is relevant the context of the map your visitors are looking at. Head over to mappam.com and take a look, or visit our blog for more details.

Mappam has been developed exclusively by ZXV Ltd, using a range of technologies. The site is powered by the Ruby on Rails web-development framework with a MySQL database running on Ubuntu Linux. Hosting is provided by AWS’s EC2 and S3 with an Ubuntu/Rails image provided by Paul Dowman.

ZXV Ltd continue to offer a range of software development consultancy services. See our consulting page to find out more.

June 29th, 2007 - Posted by in events, linux, mappam, ruby on rails | | 0 Comments

MiniBar / WhereCamp Slides

Here are the slides to accompany the presentaion given at MiniBar on the 25th May. We gave a similar version of the presentation as a lightening talk at WhereCamp, in Sunnyvale CA on the 2nd June. Enjoy!

June 8th, 2007 - Posted by in REST, api, ruby, ruby on rails, tools | | 0 Comments

Add Custom SQL to Rails Active Record Migrations

Ruby on Rails’ Migrations offer a nice alternative to traditional SQL DDL statements, that fit in with the Rails agile development philosophy. Migrations let you use Ruby code to create, alter and drop databases and tables, allowing you, amongst other things to switch databases mid-development, without having to refine your SQL.

Such convenience can sometimes mean a lack of flexibility. If you are trying to add a column to a MySQL database with type bigint unsigned, you’ll run into problems as ActiveRecord does not support unsinged bigints. You can solve the problem with some creative use of Ruby’s command line execution features - any code in a ruby file that is included between backticks(’ ` ‘) will be executed as a command line argument - so now you can include custom SQL statements without losing the benefits of Migrations:

class MyClass < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    remove_column :mytable, :old_column
    puts `mysql database -u user -ppassword
    -e 'alter table mytable add column new_column bigint unsigned'`
  end
..
..
end

April 10th, 2007 - Posted by in ruby, ruby on rails, tips | | 0 Comments