You can get up and running within minutes and have full featured authentication in place (including all of the functionality for resetting passwords, generating confirmation emails etc). The beauty of Devise lies is its flexibility – you can activate only the modules you need and its readily extensible.

There are some nice tutorials available on Railscasts, but depending on the version you are using, some of the generator code doesn’t seem to work. If you’re having difficulty following the generator instructions like:

• rails generate devise_install
• rails generate devise_views

and get an error like “Could not find generator devise_views.”, just replace the underscores with colons:

• rails generate devise:install
• rails generate devise:views

Might save you some time trying to figure out what you’ve done wrong.

These plans come with:

• Unlimited free Vodafone to Vodafone calls and texts
• On Perfect Choice Access Plus 300 and above you can choose either Unlimited Free Vodafone to Vodafone Calls & Texts or Free Calls & Texts to 5 My Friends
• 2GB of data

These plans come with:

• Unlimited free O2 to O2 calls and texts
• 2GB of data

These plans come with:

• Free unlimited 3 to 3 calls* and free BitBuzz Wi-Fi.
• 2GB of data

Note that each flex unit can be used as one minute of phonecalls or two texts (so 350 flex units can be used for 350 minutes of calls or 250 minutes of calls and 200 text etc.)

^‡You can choose one of the following add-ons:

• Unlimited Landline Calls. Unlimited calls to all ROI landlines. 1
• Down Time Calls. 150 evening & weekend minutes to any ROI mobiles or landlines.
• Call N.America. Pay only 20c per minute to call landlines and mobiles in the USA and Canada.
• Call Down Under. Pay only 38c per minute to call landlines and mobiles in Australasia.
• Call Europe. Pay only 26c per minute to call landlines and mobiles in Europe.
• Text All. 150 texts per month to any ROI mobile network.
• Internet Mini. 500MB of data.
• Internet Max. 2GB of data.

The three deals are looking like far better value than the O2 and Vodafone bundles, but three are notorious for their poor customer service. Its likely that three are trying to build their customer base by undercutting the other operators, let’s see what happens tomorrow!

Another new website we’ve been working on is for Capture Gallery, a fine art photography gallery that’s scheduled to open in Sligo within the next few weeks. Capture is the latest project of Jonathan Hill (also behind Infacta and Polldaddy) who recently opened the Shooting Stars sports photography business on High Street. The website is a monochrome, minimalist site designed to focus attention on the photography it displays — you can check it out fully when the gallery opens towards the end of the month. The site is now live and the gallery will be open to the public from June 15th.

236 people from 9 countries. 35 speakers covering 3 tracks. 50 euro for a 2 day ticket. These are some of the numbers that made the first Wordcamp Ireland such a great event, but the real secret behind it was the fantastically friendly atmosphere that other conferences like this can so easily lack. Last Friday night saw Langtons in Kilkenny open its doors to a crowd of bloggers, techies and curious georges to talk WordPress for the following 48 hours, many of whom wouldn’t set foot outside the hotel until the event was over on Sunday afternoon. This was the first Wordcamp to be held in Ireland, all thanks to the trojan work of the wonderful Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan.

The conference had three tracks (an intro, bloggers and technical track), and apart from an occasional venture into the Set Theatre for some of the main talks, I set up camp in the tech stream for the two days. The diversity and quality of speakers was excellent but Joost de Valk‘s session on optimising websites was the highlight of the weekend. Joost (aka @yoast) is a lot of things (including a Theologian (believe it or not!), Open Source evangelist and genuinely nice chap) but he’s best known for his SEO expertise and has worked with a number of very large clients including TomTom and KLM. You can see Yoast’s WordCamp slides for yourself (and they’re pretty easy to understand without any notes). Well worth having a flick through.

There were a lot of familiar faces at the event but I met lots of great new people too. There was a pretty substantial Sligo contingent down for the weekend including fellow web developer Kevin Peyton, Polldaddy Lenny and a gang of final year students from the Web Development course in IT Sligo.

I did a presentation on WordPress Theme Frameworks, which was more of an introductory / awareness talk than anything but hopefully found useful by some people. In case you’re interested, Frameworks are very minimalist themes that are designed specifically for extended and personalising. If you’re someone who develops a lot of WordPress themes, using a Framework as your starting point is a great way of cutting down on the amount of time you spend coding. I’ll post the slides here as soon as I get the finger out and strip out the animations, otherwise they’ll be unreadable. <-- edit: the Slides are available now at the bottom of this post, you'll need to read the narration in the notes tab to make any sense from them so you might be better off clicking on the title link which will bring you to the Slideshare site.

There was a huge amount of work put into this weekend by Sabrina and Katherine and they're already talking about WordCamp Ireland 2011. If it's even a fraction as good as the inaugural event, it'll be one of the finest events in next years diary — don't miss it.

Imagine advertise their Wimax product on their website as “fast reliable broadband with real speeds.” Their tagline is “Faster, Better, Cheaper” but it appears that the jury is still very much out on their claim. A long thread on Boards.ie has few positive comments with the concensus being that the overall service is flakey, speeds are nothing like advertised and customer service poor.

Typical Wimax Speed Test

There are a number of user posted speed tests, with most showing download speeds of 2 — 3 Mb/s on a 7Mb subscription. Ping times are similarly poor. For a lot of people, the service appears to be no better than a mobile 3g connection.

If you’re an Imagine subscriber based in Sligo, it’d be interesting to hear your local experiences of Imagines Wimax product. It looks like it’ll take some time to get the service up on its feet properly but at the moment it doesn’t look it would be wise to switch over from your current providers just yet. I’m sure that time will tell.

The default text formatting palette allows users to select any text colour they like (which can have very ugly results!). Heading 1 and Heading 2 tags can also be inserted where they shouldn't be.

By default, the formatting panel in TinyMCE allows users to make the text any colour they want and to insert H1 and H2 tags where they like by selecting them from the formatting drop down list. It took me a while to figure out how to disable these (and other) options but I finally worked it out.

If you’re using wordpress, all you have to do is open your functions.php file and add a filter that’s applied to the function tiny_mce_before_init. The filter calls a function that you write that changes the TinyMCE default formatting options. In the example below, I’m defining the options that will appear under the dropdown formatting list and disabling the ability to change the text colour:

function change_mce_options( $init ) {
 $init['theme_advanced_blockformats'] = 'p,address,pre,code,h3,h4,h5,h6';
 $init['theme_advanced_disable'] = 'forecolor';
 return $init;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'change_mce_options');

With this code in place, your text formatting palette will now be without the Heading 1, Heading 2 and text colouring options and should look like this:

This customised palette has no text colour button. The Heading 1 and Heading 2 tags have been removed from the formatting dropdown.

For more configuration options, have a look through the TinyMCE Configuration Options. This method will work for any backend that uses TinyMCE and not just WordPress.

Website performance is something that a lot of developers leave to chance and don’t address head on, and many websites (in particular WordPress backed sites that are plugin-heavy and don’t make use of page caching) are relatively slow to load. There are many factors that affect the speed of websites, but they’re usually quite readily identified and fixed. It’s likely that developers will pay closer attention to page load time now that Google have announced they’re watching it.

Although Google and the other Search Engines won’t publicise every factor that affects a webpage’s search engine rank, they often give strong hints and the release of a new tool like this is probably the strongest hint they’ll give.

When I heard that Vodafone would be offering the iPhone in Ireland in 2010, I signed up to the news mailing list to get informed of any announcements. Vodafone phoned today to offer an early subscription to the iPhone before it rolls out fully in the near year (I presume they called everyone on their mailing list, I’m not special!). Here’s some of the price plan details:

• Plan 1: €35 per month. 16GB iPhone 3Gs costs €199.No included any network minutes or texts.
• Plan 2: €49.99 per month. 16GB iPhone 3Gs costs €199. 150 any network minutes, 150 any network texts.
• Plan 3: €64.99 per month. 16GB iPhone is ‘free’. 300 any network minutes, 300 any network texts.

Each of these options include 2GB of data download per month, free Vodafone calls and are subject to an 18 month minimum contract. There are more expensive options available but I didn’t get the details.

The price plans are likely to change fairly often so it’s probably worth checking their website to get up to date information.