Over the last few months I’ve realised that the speed at which I develop new projects is a lot quicker than it used to be. So I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned and also some quite obvious things (to me at least).
Use a Base Application
I’m obviously going to be horrifically biased [...]

This is a just a quick post that will hopefully save some people a hell of a lot of time.
If you’re trying to get the width and height of a flash file, a banner for example, then you can use the ImageSpec library by Brandon Anderson.
You can checkout the code with the following:
svn checkout http://ruby-imagespec.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ [...]

I’m not going to cover how to actually code an entire social network site in rails as all social network sites vary in their functionality (and it’ll take too long). I will cover plugins and other things you might find useful though.
Quick Start
If you don’t really want to do the coding but want to get [...]