Talentopoly Blog

New Feature: Queue Your Posts With Post Scheduling

2012-02-22T09:30:00.000-05:00

You can now schedule all those great links you're discovering and posting. This is a feature that several users had requested. I've had users tell me that they often have a few links they'd like to post but didn't want to spam the site with several links at once. Now you can space them out.

How It Works

When writing a post simply click the Scheduling link to toggle it on. Then fill in the number of hours from now for the post to be submitted.

Note: If you have linked your Twitter account to auto-share your posts the tweet will go out at approximately the scheduled time.

Benefits

Let you post several links at once without spamming the site
More frequent content
Better serve all time zones

Implementation

For those interested in the development details here's a quick synopsis of how this all works. If you have any questions or suggestions leave them as a comment and I'd be happy to read them.

I retooled the system to work off a posted_at date field for each post. The posted_at is calculated by adding the current time with the desired hours from now to post, which defaults to zero. Posts with a posted_at time greater than the current time are scheduled. There's a handy method in the posts class that exposes this check. Rails's scopes provided an elegant solution for modifying all of the queries with a simple .posted or .scheduled scope. The cool thing about using a posted_at is that posts, scheduled or not, can be stored in the same table and no cron job is needed to "post" them at the desired time.

To avoid the complexity of time zones I stuck with an approach that is time relevant in that posts are scheduled n hours from now. This pushes some basic time calculation on the user but I tried to make that easier by limiting the scheduling to hours and not including minutes. The purpose is to simply space posts out and not get too exact about the actual post time.

Posts that are scheduled, when edited, reveal the hours from now field.

An hourly cron job, using Heroku's new scheduler, handles tweeting the posts. It looks at the hours from now field to see if it has a number above zero. Once the post is tweeted that number is zeroed out.

Results

I'm hoping to write a follow up post in a few weeks with some metrics on whether posting frequency does indeed increase.

Town Hall - 2.22.12

2012-02-21T20:38:00.001-05:00

Post scheduling

We'll be discussing the brand new post scheduling feature in this week's town hall. I'm interested to hear users' feedback on the feature.

Job board

Our conversation on how to develop an effective job board will be continuing. There's already been a lot of great conversation on the topic. Come have your say and help us figure out how to create a job board that lists freelance projects, contract work and salary positions in a way that works for you.

API Status

I'll give an update on our API and how the various development projects are going.

It's going to be great chat. I hope you can join us.

Time and place

The chat can be found at http://talentopoly.com/chats

09:00 AM (Wednesday, 22) - 10:00 AM PST
12:00 PM (Wednesday, 22) - 01:00 PM EST
05:00 PM (Wednesday, 22) - 06:00 PM GMT
10:30 PM (Wednesday, 22) - 11:30 PM IST
02:00 AM (Thursday, 23) - 03:00 AM JST

Talentopoly Town Hall Chat Today

2012-02-08T10:01:00.001-05:00

We've got some great stuff to talk about today at 12 EST.

Discuss how the bookmarklet is working for everyone
Firefox and Safari extensions coming (really) soon
How the closed API beta is going with updates from some of the developers
Next week's new feature: scheduling posts
And lastly we'll discuss job boards and recruiters to see if we can find ways to market great jobs and projects on the site

Join us at 12pm EST today (Feb 8th) at http://talentopoly.com/chats

Working productively at home in your underwear

2012-02-03T11:16:00.002-05:00

Time-management for freelancers

Are you a freelancer or thinking of becoming one? Well then you should know how to effectively manage your time. It's a critical skill that often times gets overlooked. The general thinking is that you don't need to worry about it since you can work day and night. But to be effective you're going to need to become a time management ninja.

Anthony Panozzo is a freelance ninja in learning. He'll be sharing his thoughts in a chat this Monday.

Here's when it's happening

06:00 PM (Monday, 6) - 07:00 PM PST
09:00 PM (Monday, 6) - 10:00 PM EST
02:00 AM (Tuesday, 7) - 03:00 AM GMT
07:30 AM (Tuesday, 7) - 08:30 AM IST
11:00 AM (Tuesday, 7) - 12:00 PM JST

And here's the where

http://talentopoly.com/chats/24

Icing on the cake

You don't need to be a member to view the chat. So you can pass this link around, tweet it, whatever.

Apology for the duplicate bookmarklet news email

2012-02-01T00:10:00.001-05:00

A bug in our newsletter mailer caused the bookmarklet newsletter email to be resent. I apologize for this and am putting safeguards in place to protect against this in the future.

Come Hangout in the Official Talentopoly IRC Channel

2012-01-31T10:00:00.000-05:00

There is now an official #talentopoly IRC channel on Freenode (irc.freenode.net)!

Topics

We have a few members who have started hanging out in the channel. It's a good place to come ask a quick question and get help from the community. Topics range from discussing hosting providers to programming questions to whether someone should buy a MacBook Air.

Web client

If you'd like to use a web client to connect check out http://webchat.freenode.net/.

Extras

Arlo Carreon is working on a Hubot install for the channel to add some humor and an interactive FAQ.

Hope to see you in there!

This week's meta discussion

2012-01-25T08:45:00.000-05:00

An exciting new feature for Talentopoly will be launching at today's meta discussion. Be one of the first to check it out.

Chat details

Jan 25 at 12pm EST

http://talentopoly.com/chats/23

Other topics to discuss

API closed beta
SSL protection
Scheduling posts
How the community would want a job board to function

The last topic is one we need to start discussing. The plan is to come up with a way to help match good gigs with talented developers & designers through the site.

Big moves for fellow cohost Stephen Dixon

2012-01-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

Stephen Dixon was an intrepid podcast cohost and a talented designer too. Unfortunately for us Stephen recently got a new job and won't have time to cohost the podcast. Apparently there are things more important than the podcast. Who knew?

On a serious note, congrats on the new job!

Don't worry, we'll have our token Brit back as a guest from time to time.

Meta discussion (1:30pm EST) - Newsletter, Podcast tweaks, Bookmarklet progress and more

2012-01-11T10:10:00.001-05:00

Important: The chat has been moved to 1:30 EST this afternoon due to a scheduling conflict.

Topics

1. Discussing the first monthly newsletter
2. Get feedback on proposed tweaks to the podcast
3. Give an update on the bookmarklet

I hope to see you in the chat!
http://talentopoly.com/chats/22

Changes to the Podcast

2012-01-09T19:33:00.000-05:00

I want to share with you some changes that are coming to the podcast. Something we've discussed since the beginning is quality. The aim is to create a podcast that supports the main goals of the site. That is to help people improve their craft by staying current and learning new things.

If you haven't heard the podcast you can tune in at http://podcast.talentopoly.com. There's also an RSS and iTunes feed. If you enjoy Instacast you can find us on there too.

Doing a better job

I think we can do a better job. We've done 22 podcasts to date and each one has been unique. It's been a learning experience for me. Before this podcast my only experience had been as a guest on 8IFY. Along the way I think I've begun to understand some of things that are working and a few things that don't.

More guests (and cow bell)

Having guests on the show is both a lot of fun and a boon to traffic. Our most listened to episode was not surprisingly the one we did with Rogie King. Guests bring a fresh perspective and new listeners. We get a chance to interview them in a candid, relaxed setting. Rogie and Cameron both appreciated that the questions aren't scripted and having a drink during the show doesn't hurt either. So the first thing we're going to do is have at least one guest a month on the podcast.

Biweekly episodes

Having a podcast to discuss some of the most interesting links posted on Talentopoly is yet another source for consuming the content on the site. For those that commute or don't have time to read the links being posted on the site I hope the podcast offers a good alternative. The problem is that doing a podcast with 8 - 10 links to discuss each week means we don't have time to research them in any meaningful depth. So we're going to try doing a deep dive on each link we plan to discuss. To manage this we're going to tackle fewer links and move to a biweekly schedule where we record an episode every other week. Hopefully we'll be able to describe and discuss the links at a level of detail that people find valuable.

Shelving live streaming (for now)

We don't always record at the same time, which makes it hard to schedule a live show. Live streaming also adds a layer of technical complexity. We had a few technical glitches including an annoying echo in the two recordings we live streamed. So we're going to put live streaming on the shelf for the time being. That doesn't mean that we won't revisit it down the road. It just means that for now we're going to focus on some other aspects of the podcast first.

tl;dr

Focus on quality

Expect more expert guests
We'll play with and really research the links we plan to discuss
As a result the podcast will be every other week
And we're going to discuss fewer links

Conversion to Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.1 complete

2012-01-07T17:46:00.003-05:00

The site has been updated to run on Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.1.

Performance

For those interested in how performance is effected I will post some before and after stats soon.

Credits

Ed Rudd - Lead code wrangler for the conversion
Abelardo Gonzalez - Beta tester
Arlo Carreon - Beta tester

How to validate acts_as_taggable_on tags in Rails 3

2012-01-06T10:04:00.000-05:00

The answer to this question had eluded me and I couldn't find a good existing answer to it after a few Google searches. I figured it out and the answer was simple, which is always great. Hopefully this helps someone.

My problem

acts_as_taggable_on doesn't use validators to prevent excessively long tags or tags with periods in them.

One of our beta testers found that he could enter any length tag name in a new post and it would be accepted. Except that the database uses a 255 character varying length string so anything bigger will blow up the page.

Periods will screw up your tag show route if you use the name as the id (this is a common practice) since Rails routes use the period as a delimiter to infer the format (json, etc).

Solution

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base

acts_as_taggable

validates :tag_list, :length => { :maximum => 30 } # Limit to 30 tags max

validate :each_tag

private

def each_tag

for tag in tag_list

errors.add(:tag, "too long (maximum is 50 characters)") if tag.length > 50

errors.add(:tag, "can't contain a period") if tag.include? '.'

end

Failed attempts

Before I arrived at the above code I tried a couple things that didn't work.

First attempt

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base

validates_associated :taggings

end

class Tagging < ActiveRecord::Base

validates_associated :tag

end

class Tag < ActiveRecord::Base

validates :name, :length => { :maximum => 30 }

end

Besides this one needing a Tagging.rb model be created, which I didn't like, it didn't work.

Second attempt

Tag.validate :name, :length => { :maximum => 50 }

Why the solution works

tag_list exists before the model is saved. The tags don't exist at this point because the model hasn't been saved.

Thankfully tag_list is stored as a collection so you can traverse it easily and run validators on it the way you'd want to. That's why this works.

Note: If you have named your tag set something else, say for instance "bands" then it would be "band_list".

Tomorrow We're Podcasting

2012-01-04T00:46:00.001-05:00

After taking the last two weeks off for the holidays we'll be back on the mic with drinks in hand tomorrow night. We also have a few changes up our sleeves for the podcast. But I don't want to give anything away just yet.

No live stream

For the time being we're going to shelve the live stream. We didn't have a large turn out and there are some technical glitches we need to work out if we're going to do that again.

Hot and fresh

The podcast will be posted later tomorrow night with the show notes. As usual you'll be able to find it via the RSS, iTunes, Instacast and of course on http://podcast.talentopoly.com

Converting Talentopoly to Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9

2012-01-02T18:30:00.001-05:00

Today we started beta testing a version of Talentopoly converted to Rails 3.1.x.

Specs

Rails 3.1.3
Ruby MRI 1.9.2
Heroku's Bamboo stack

We're fairly late to the Rails 3 party. The app runs on Rails 2.3.4 and Ruby 1.8.7 currently. There were other features that topped our list in Q3 such as the hosted chats and that pushed the conversion back.

There are a lot of great in-depth resources like this one on how to do the conversion so I won't try to create yet another one.

Some rough notes

Here are some rough notes on what the conversion was like for those still waiting to upgrade their apps.

Talentopoly is relatively small

25 controllers
30 models
20 gems

It took roughly 20 hours to convert the app
The Rails Upgrade plugin made things a lot easier - https://github.com/rails/rails_upgrade
Generators were used to create fresh copies of framework files
We're waiting to implement the asset pipeline
Migrating to Bamboo stack (for Rails 1.9.2) was a piece of cake, as is everything, on Heroku
All work was done in a Git branch of course, which was merged easily into master
All plugins were removed in favor of their gem counterparts

Have I mentioned how great Bundler is? It's a big reason to do the upgrade.

RVM and gemsets made it a breeze to test locally during the conversion

Gotchas

Here are some gotchas to watch out for.

Rails 3 escapes html be default so you won't need h() anymore.
Forms require <%= instead of <%
ActiveRecord has been overhauled

This

Article.find(:all, :conditions => ["published_at <= ?", Time.now], :include => :comments)

Is now this

Article.where("published_at <= ?", Time.now).includes(:comments)

The former will work for now, but it's best to convert over to the new syntax

I'm interested in seeing how performance is effected. Also Rails 3.2 will be out soon and the explain queries should help in optimizing the database (indexes, etc).

If all goes well this new version will be live in production soon.

Podcast this week - Wed @ 9pm EST

2011-12-19T23:26:00.005-05:00

We'll be streaming on Ustream at 9pm EST this Wed night. Steve's busy this week so Brandon will have to fake a British accent.

No podcast this week

2011-12-14T10:31:00.001-05:00

The holiday season is taking its egg nog, holiday party, bad holiday movies toll on us this week. Unfortunately that means no podcast this week. We'll be back live on Ustream next week.

Talentopoly Podcast Episode 20 Live Broadcast on Ustream

2011-12-06T17:41:00.001-05:00

The Talentopoly Podcast has made it to the ripe old age of 20 episodes. So we felt it was time to kick it up a notch and several of our listeners have requested live broadcasts.

Ustream

Tomorrow night we'll be recording live on Ustream. It'll be an audio only broadcast. Hey, we're new to this so we're taking it one step at a time. We'll graduate to video soon enough. If you're interested in tuning in the details are below.

When

Wed, Dec 7th

8 - 9 pm EST

Where

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/talentopoly-podcast

Chat

We hope to see you in the Ustream chat tomorrow night!

@FictiveCameron in the Weekly Member Spotlight

2011-09-23T19:44:00.001-04:00

I'm excited to introduce the uber-talented Cameron Koczon. He recently launched Gimme Bar, a really interesting way to bookmark and share things that inspire you.

Hi Cameron, can you tell us something about yourself?

Hello. Welcome to my bio. My real name is Cameron Koczon but I go by Fictive Cameron on the Internet. I run a web company called Fictive Kin based in Brooklyn, NY. We're currently working furiously on an app called Gimme Bar which is, as they say, neato torpedo. I co-created a to do list application called TeuxDeux and co-organize a web conference called Brooklyn Beta. I like co-doing things because it’s more fun to work on awesome things with awesome people. I sometimes post to his off-kilter blog. I smoke a pipe.

Get in touch with Cameron

He will be answering questions in the Questions section of the site this Mon - Fri (Sept 26th - 30th). To ask him a question just put @FictiveCameron somewhere in the question title. He'll also be sipping some whiskey and talking about Gimme Bar on this week's podcast. Cameron is super busy putting the finishing touches on his awesome Brooklyn Beta 2011 conference so he won't be hosting a chat this week. But hopefully he can be persuaded to host one down the road. ;)

What is the Member Spotlight Series?

Since this is the first member spotlight I'll explain it if you've got a minute. Each week we'll shine the spotlight on a member. For that week you'll have direct access to them. They will be invited to answer questions on the site, be a guest on the podcast if they're daring enough and they might even host a chat session during that week. I hope this will be a great way to give you unparalleled access to some of the talented professionals working in the fields of programming, design, and IT.

By the way, if you're interested in being part of the member spotlight series I'd love to hear from you. It's a great way to get noticed by the almost two thousand members on the site. You can send me a message via my profile http://talentopoly.com/users/1 or send a tweet to @jaredbrown letting me know you're interested and I'll get in touch with you.

What I Learned from Designing the Cover Art for the Talentopoly Podcast

2011-08-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'm a developer attempting to do design. It's not always pretty but I can generally find my way around Photoshop. So when it came time to design an album cover for my new podcast I decided to give it a try.

Here are a few things I learned in the process.

Designing cover art has some things in common with icon design. You need to optimize it for a small size (50x50) even though it also needs to look good at 600x600. Contrast is important and 99% of the covers I looked at in iTunes made the title text as large as possible.

This is a first attempt at a cover and I am sure I'll change it out after a dozen episodes or so. Next time around I'm going to go with a more typical font (maybe Franklin Gothic Heavy). Something that will be readable after resizing it. The lowercase first letters in the title are because the pillowcase font I used only had lowercase. Some people have complained to me about this.

Don't put slogans or descriptions in your cover. You won't be able to read them after it is resized. I tried to focus on listing the keywords that would attract my demographic by answering the who is this for question.

I also think it's important to make the cover exciting. Giving a sense of motion or dimension to the type can go a long way to doing this.

That said, I'd love to get some feedback from the community so I know what to improve the next time around.

If you'd like to give the podcast a listen you can find it over at http://podcast.talentopoly.com.

Announcing the New Talentopoly Podcast

2011-08-15T09:00:00.001-04:00

I am happy to announce the new Talentopoly Podcast with not one but two episodes recorded and ready for your listening pleasure.

The podcast discusses some of the best links posted to Talentopoly.com each week. It is co-hosted by Stephen Dixon, a designer living in the UK, and Brandon Corbin, a developer & designer living in Indiana.

I was inspired to start doing a podcast after watching Kevin Rose's 2009 FOWA presentation where he said that all startups should be doing one. That was back in May. The idea stuck in my head but with vacations and a busy work schedule it had to be put on the back shelf.

It's been a whirlwind last two weeks getting everything ready and recording our first two shows.

For those who are interested here's my podcast stack.

The blog is hosted on Tumblr since it's drop-dead simple to setup & maintain
MP3s hosted on S3 (reduced redundancy option checked to save cash)
Skype & Skype Call Recorder for audio capture
Garageband for editing
Custom intro music from a musically-talented friend
Outro music courtesy of Garageband
Feedburner for podcast directory compatibility and feed stats
Google Analytics with custom event tracking for Subscribe and Download clicks

I hope you enjoy the podcast and if you have any feedback feel free to let me know it.

Help us climb the charts in iTunes and InstaCast by subscribing to our podcast feed.

Podcast RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TalentopolyPodcast

Instapaper Integration - Save great articles on Talentopoly to read later

2011-05-28T12:11:00.001-04:00

If you use Instapaper you might be happy to know that it is now integrated into the site. If you find an article you want to save for later you can now click "Read Later" next to the title on its detail page.

The "Read Later" button only appears on an individual post's detail page. In testing it cluttered the list views to have the button next to each title. I realize not everyone uses "Read Later" so I wanted to make sure it was out of the way but that users who wanted it knew where to get it. So that's why it's only on the detail pages.

If you haven't checked out Instapaper you can check it out at http://instapaper.com/. There is a fantastic universal app for iOS that sells for $4.99.

Tagging is Now Live!

2011-05-25T22:35:00.002-04:00

One of the most requested features has been to allow tagging of posts. Now, as of tonight, they can.

And Then There Was Tagging

Posts can have any number of tags attached to them.

Tags are optional
The tags are searchable. Just search posts as you normally would.
They can include spaces (i.e. "ruby on rails" is allowed)
Clicking a tag will show all posts tagged with it
Tags will autocomplete
Anyone can create a new tag

Special Tags

I gave three tags special importance within the site. Programming, design, and IT appear in the top of the main navigation. The goal is to make it easy to filter posts by one of the three core audiences of the site. It is recommended that each post is tagged with one of these three tags.

Setting Up Tags

Anyone can create new tags. To help seed a useful set of tags I will be adding tags on all the posts in the system. The plan is to open this up to all members so everyone can edit the tags on any post. But it will take time to get all the way there. In the meantime enjoy tagging your posts.

Once you've checked it out I'd love to hear what you think.

Daily Posts Limit Lifted for Veteran Members

2011-05-21T23:18:00.000-04:00

I wanted to post a quick update on a small change I made quietly last week to the site. Users who have been members for at least 30 days now no longer have a limit of 5 posts per day. They are free to post as many great links as they wish per day. I'm monitoring this closely to ensure it's not abused but I think some users have so many interesting things to share that 5 posts per day wasn't enough. If this works it might be the start of more privileges to come for veteran members. I might even work up a badge for user profiles to signify veteran status. If you have a comment on this change or a related idea I'd love to hear it.

What I've Been Up To Lately

2011-05-18T19:23:00.000-04:00

Front-end Optimization

I've been working with James Sanderson (@zofrex) on speeding up the load times of the site through front-end optimization. This is an area that has needed some much needed love. We've come up with a list of areas we're going to target. Two weeks ago I removed prototype, scriptaculous, modalbox, and livepipe.js from the site and converted the entire site to run on jQuery.

The site had been stuck between the two libraries (prototype and jQuery). I knew I needed to get it completely running on jQuery to reduce the dependencies I was pulling in. It feels great knowing the site is now running completely on jQuery. jRails went a long way to helping make this transition quick and easy. The immediate effect on end-users will be the reduced number of assets pulled down on initial load.

Work continues on this front and next up is something I've been wanting to play with for a while, Sass. I got to hear Jina Bolton speak about Sass at ValioCon this past weekend. That was all I needed to push me over the edge and convince me I need to be using it. It'll allow my to keep my CSS organized in various files but then use imports to bring them all in under one CSS file, which it can minify. The big win here will be reducing the CSS assets pulled down from quite a few to one.

I won't be resting there. There are lots of other areas I want to address including modifying headers, using sprites and investigating a faster DNS provider.

Page Titles

This is a feature that has been a long time coming. Most pages on the site now have proper titles stating what they are. It'll be interesting to see what if any effect this has on traffic coming from Google. Of course it now makes it easier to bookmark a page and know what it is you bookmarked. Enjoy.

Feedback Tab

The feedback tab is gone but you can still get to the GetSatisfaction page using the brand new Feedback link in the footer.

Better Exception Handling

With the recent move from GetExceptional to Hoptoad JavaScript errors are now being captured in addition to exceptions on the backend.

Slow Site Last Monday

You may have noticed that the site was a bit slow last Monday afternoon. This was caused by a DDoS attack on Heroku. The attack is continuing but has been mitigated.

As always, thanks for making Talentopoly such a great place.

Button Rollovers and jQuery Transition

2011-04-26T23:16:00.000-04:00

Button Rollovers Complete

I finally completed the button rollovers. This consisted of me spending a lot of time in Photoshop crafting hover states and some new buttons for the site. At some point I'll look into converting the buttons to CSS and have them gracefully degrade on older browsers. CSS buttons would have reduced the time cost of this effort by an order of magnitude. But at the moment I'm using the rollover effects designed by Brian Hoff. You don't realize how many buttons your site has until you do an exercise like this. I'm glad it's behind me now.

What's Next?

I'm a big proponent of cleaning up after yourself as you go. So I'm going to tackle transitioning fully from Prototype/Scriptaculous to jQuery. I don't think this will be too painful but it will mean that a few dependencies will need to go away and be replaced by things like FancyBox. The benefit will be a reduced asset load on initial load by new and mobile users. I hope to have this transition done this week but we'll see how it goes. After that it'll be back to more fun features and first on the list is a tagging system for posts. You can still weigh in on the topic on my other blog post specifically about tagging.

As always you can weigh in on what you'd like to see worked on next on the Roadmap (found in the footer of Talentopoly if you are signed in).