As I’ve mentioned here before, when working on web applications built with PHP, whether custom-rolled or drupal-driven, I often find myself missing various tools from the ruby kit. I’ve talked before about using capistrano with non-ruby code, but lately it’s been rspec and its stories that I’ve been craving.

I’m aware of PHPSpec and have played with it from time to time, but the lack of a compelling way to work with mocks/stubs has slowed my adoption, and last time I checked it didn’t offer anything for high level user stories. So this week I set out to harness cucumber and webrat to write some simple stories.

It turns out to be pretty easy. There’s no nice simple support for test environments, fixtures, mocks or stubs, but if you just want to make sure that a few pages load correctly, and have the right elements, or that logging in works as you expected, then it’ll do the job.

I’ve not done any packaging up of the code, mainly because there’s so little to it. My folder structure is:

specs/
  Rakefile
  features/
    admin_articles.feature
    steps/
      admin_steps.rb

(click on the links to see sample files)

I simply set up those files, go into the folder and type ‘rake features’ to put your site through its paces.

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About eighteen months ago I compiled a series of reviews of Ruby on Rails plugins concerned with geography. I put together a comparison chart and posted it on this blog. It subsequently found a new home on a wiki, but lately that wiki has rarely been accessible so I decided it was time to move it all back into this site.

You can now find the comparison chart at: http://jystewart.net/process/resources/rails-geo-plugins/

A few updates have been lost along the way as they were solely made on the wiki, but hopefully it’s still of use. Since I published the original reviews and chart my attention has wandered a little from the geo plugin scene, so please do flag up any new plugins, changes in features or fixes that I may have missed. I’m going to be trying to check through all the existing listings to update them but that may take a while, so comments here may well encourage me to focus more quickly.

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Over at Netsquared.org Amy Sample Ward has posted another of their regular ThinkTank questions. This time around it’s:

What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?

I’m coming in a bit late. There are some good responses appearing, such as those from Ashley Messick and Beth Kanter which offer a number of key questions to consider when developing a strategy for your organisation. The responses to date are summarised on the netsquared site.

The element I’d like to emphasise is finding out who in your team already plays with these things and how. There’s an increasing chance that there will be people in your organisation who already devote some of their free time (and maybe even work time) to activities that fall under ’social media’, whether or not they recognise it: staff members with facebook profiles, a keen photographer who meets others on flickr, or someone who throws the odd video up on youtube. There are a lot of people who have used ’social media’ in some way shape or form. It may take some careful facilitation to turn those playful experiences into strategic ideas for your organisation, but they should not be overlooked.

In a strong sense, most of your audience’s interactions with social media will fall under the category of play. These websites and media are all about social interactions and free-form creativity, and it’s vital to maintain some of that in your training and your approach to engagement. You don’t have to turn everything into a game (though the power of games is well worth considering) but people are much more likely to remain engaged and your staff are going to remain energised if there’s a sense of playfulness about how you use social media.

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A couple of years ago I wrote and released a Ruby on Rails plugin called loads_from_amazon. It made it relatively simple to populate a model with data based on an amazon search, and was very helpful in the project I was then working on.

That project ended and I’ve not had time to maintain the plugin since. It was based on a clunky amazon ECS library and I kept meaning to rewrite it to sit on something more up to date, like amazon-ecs, but the time never materialised.

Today I stumbled upon acts_as_amazon_product which looks like it does everything my plugin did, and more. If you’re looking for that functionality, it seems like that’s the place to go.

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So far as I’m aware, there’s not been much to link a small street near Victoria with Lesotho, South Africa, and 47 countries. Until now.

Thanks to a collaboration between photographer James Nachtwey/XDRTB.org and moblog.net one may emerge in the next few hours.

Gaining (maybe even seizing) attention is key to any campaign. Connecting causes with play (tastefully, of course) is a great way to attract it and (if you can pull it off) mystery is a potent extra component. I’m excited to see what develops in the next few hours.

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