After reading Maureen Kelly’s excellent article on Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint on Boxes and Arrows, I was reminded of how nicely simple tools can be used to quickly show ideas like this. I’ve tried this before with Flash, but it was too awkward. I’ve also tried it with Adobe Acrobat, but I don’t like using that program. It doesn’t seem well suited for that.

Yet both Acrobat and presentation software like PowerPoint and Keynote let you make “links” in your presentation, and since you can save them out to PDF files, you get the same effect. It’s like a paper prototype on your display! In fact, you could just scan in a bunch of pages of prototypes you’ve sketched out, and make the links on there actually work, which is about the quickest way I can think of to get click-ability on a primitive prototype like that.

Curious, I downloaded the example PowerPoint files from that article, and they opened in Keynote beautifully. I was able to use the links and everything. From there, I was even able to export a PDF, which also worked perfectly, links and all.

So I highly recommend this method for quickly showing clients how your website will work. It could save you tons of time, backtracking because your layout or flow doesn’t make sense!

Rails is a great framework for developing websites, and Ruby is a great programming language to work in. We love them both very much, and if I had my way, I’d probably build all our websites using Ruby on Rails.

However, there is one serious issue. It’s called hosting. It’s the important stuff that your website does most of the time. And Rails has some really big problems there. In fact, they’ve been with Rails all along.

We host a number of sites, built with this framework, for ourselves and our clients. And those sites are possibly the biggest source of stress and headaches in my job. That’s not a good thing. I like to enjoy my work.

Take Gone Raw for example. Myself and another very talented individual moved this site to a Joyent Accelerator several months ago. Why? Because it kept going down. The website would just stop working, and we had to manually restart it. And guess what? It does that more than ever on the new fancy Accelerator! And the only way I can get it to start working again, thus far, is manually restarting that server.

That is ridiculous. That is laughable.

Today, a client’s site started mysteriously showing errors all over the place. I thought this was what PHP did! Nope, it happens with Rails, too. We launched another personal project last month, also in Rails, and it has problems staying up as well. In fact, not a single Rails site that we host is able to stay up by itself. Every single one requires some sort of elaborate hack to keep it going. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that a PHP site requires absolutely none of this funky business.

I am starting to suspect that you can’t really be 100% confident in hosting Rails sites unless you have a full-time staffer making sure they stay up. And that’s just not in the cards for a tiny business like ours. So we’re evaluating our other options, such a subcontracting someone for the job.

However, we’ll certainly be thinking twice before deploying our next Rails-based site!

A new month brings forth the latest Needmore newsletter!

The cabbage, kale and cucumbers spilling from our gardens are encouraging us to pull grandma’s canning cookbooks from the dusty shelves. And while the vegetables are doing their best to remind us that it is, indeed, August, the drizzly days have found us in our favorite chairs blazing through books, wondering what happened to our Portland dream summer. C’mon P-town! Give us some sun! We’ve got the next nine months to read!

Read the rest of our August newsletter here.

This is very clever. Designer Arnaud Lapierre has come up with a doorknob that you can retract from within your room – pretty well ensuring privacy, as anyone on the outside can’t turn the knob to open the door!