I’ve always had a problem using the RSS feed from my Basecamp account. This problem occurs because I exclusively use Google Reader for feeds. Reader is one of the many feed readers that DO NOT support authenticated feeds. This would be a feed that requires some sort of username and/or password.

Well now this problem is all but eliminated! A new service called FreeMyFeed allows you to enter your authenticated feed as well as your login information to receive a new feed that will be unprotected. They say that your usernames and passwords are never stored but so does every other site on the planet now… so take that with a grain of salt.

The service does work flawlessly though.

It’s a simple process:

• Go to FreeMyFeed
• Enter the RSS Feed
• Enter your credentials
• Copy new feed
• Enter that feed address into your reader of choice

Now get out of here and try it out!

Yes, it can be done! Contrary to popular belief… Windows can be a great Rails development platform. I know that those Mac guys have you all convinced that it’s too hard and painful to do and you should just go be a switcher. Well today I am going to show you, with a little work, you can be up and running with ease….similar to a Mac.

To begin, I wanted to say that the basis for this article orginally came from a post over at Garbage Burrito on how to get a Mac-esque development environment using windows. After being asked a few times at my local Ruby group how I develop on a Windows machine… I have decided to go a little more in depth and show you exactly what I’ve come up with. So here we go!

Most of you may already know that Sqlite3 is the default database used by Rails now in 2.02. This can be easily changed using the ‘-d’ parameter when using your ‘rails’ command. The reason I mention this is because I’ve been using Sqlite3 for a bit and have had a bit of difficulty when it comes to using add_column in my migrations. For that reason I am going to suggest installing MySQL. If you know what you’re doing and don’t want MySQL, go ahead and skip this step.

Step 1 | With that being said… Go install MySQL. You can easily find it at their site. I suggest not grabbing the ‘Essentials’ version just to make sure that you have everything you need if the time comes. Make sure you go through the installer and at the end you’ll want to use the ‘Server Instance Config Wizard’ to setup the server.

Step 2 | Go install e-Text Editor! I have used a bunch of text editors to try and get that TextMate feel but this is so far the closest Windows alternative. If you like it, please buy it. The creator updates very frequently and I’m sure he would love your support.

Step 3 | Since e-Text Editor is a TextMate clone… it uses a lot of UNIX commands. So we’ll now need to now install Cygwin. This is a emulated UNIX shell that can run under Windows. This also helps since a lot of the tutorials for Rails were created under Mac/Linux… you can easily follow along. Pretty much click through the installer. There are only a couple places to make sure settings are correct. When you hit the ‘Choose Installation Directory’ screen, you will want to make sure that ‘Install For’ is set to ‘Just Me’ and the ‘Default Text File Type’ is set to ‘Unix / binary (RECOMMENDED)’. These are probably the default settings but I wanted to make sure that you get this correct. Go ahead and continue clicking through the installation screens until you get to the ‘Select Packages’ screen. Think of these as a list of ‘addons’ for Cygwin. You will need a bunch of them so I will list all that I use. To make it easier, click on the ‘View’ button until it changes to ‘Full’. Now we can see all packages available. These are the packages I have installed (many are selected by default but these are extras you will need):

• curl
• gcc (needed to compile certain gems)
• git
• grep
• keychain
• make (needed to compile certain gems)
• ruby
• rsync (it’s useful for other things not Rails related)
• sqlite3
• subversion
• subversion-ruby
• wget
• which

Go ahead and finish going through the installer. It may install for a while, that is normal.

Step 4 | Do yourself a favor and install Console. This very useful program lets you have tabbed command prompt windows open. Once that is installed you will want to go into settings and add a tab for Cygwin. Name it whatever you want but you’ll want to enter this command ( c:\cygwin\bin\bash –login -i )into the shell field. Enough said.

Step 5 | Install Ruby Gems. Download and unzip to your system. I put mine in the root directory, doesn’t really matter where it goes. Once you have that done… use Cygwin to navigate the the Ruby Gems folder. Then install Ruby Gems by invoking setup.rb.

1. cd c:
2. cd /Ruby\ gems (or where ever you put it)
3. ruby setup.rb

Step 6 | Install Rails. Now what you’ve all been waiting for… Ruby on Rails. Rails will come to you as a ‘Gem’. It’s really just a kind of package management, which is really great for keeping things up to date. You can install any gem using the ‘gem’ command and a sequence of parameters.

• gem install rails --include-dependencies

When going through this process, the package management will ask you to install other gems as well. These are OK as Rails has dependencies and we want them included. These should be:

• actionpack
• activerecord
• activeresource
• activesupport
• rake

Step 7 | Install other needed Gems. This may be different for all of you, but since we are using MySQL… we should install the gem that binds rails to it. I will also list some others that I have been using. Please let me know what you start out with in the comment section.

• gem install mysql
• gem install mongrel
• gem install haml (purely preference)
• gem install rspec
• gem install rspec-haml-scaffold (purely preference)

Step 8 | Try it out! Hoping that I didn’t miss anything here… this should work! From now on you’ll be using Cygwin as your command line editor. When you start Cygwin, you should be placed in your ‘home’ directory. I usually make a directory called ‘websites’ or something similar. I recommend this so you don’t have your projects scattered all over your home directory.

• mkdir websites

Now you will want to cd into your ‘websites’ directory so that we can make a new Rails project. Go ahead and make the obligatory test blog using this command.

• rails blog -d mysql

Again, now that Sqlite3 is the default database for Rails… you’ll need to add the ‘-d’ parameter with what database you’d like to use. As previously discussed, we will be using MySQL.

If all works correctly, you should see Rails creating your directory structure and all is well! If not, go ahead and leave a comment on how much I suck at writing tutorials. :-)

Hope this helps the Rails/Windows community and again please let me know if there is anything I can add to this article.

Thanks to Ben Kittrell of Garage Burrito for laying the ground work with his original article.

Digsby has just gone public beta!  This is great because now you can just go to the site and download without the need for an invite code. Not that it was hard to get one before but still… this is better.

Just so we’re on the same page… Digsby is an IM, all-in-one, client. It’s similar to Trillian, but way cooler. You can add all of your IM accounts plus your profiles at Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. It is really great to have everything all in one spot!

I will personally vouch for this application. It’s been in use on all my machines for a few months now and I have had absolutely not trouble with it what so ever. Updates come through almost every day, which is great because you know that it is actively being worked on.

Go out and download this application right now! You will not be sorry.

I’ve got to say… IT’S ABOUT TIME! I’m not much on social network sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc…) but I know that what I don’t like about them is you have to change your ’status’ message on all of them separately. Now the fantastic folks over at HelloTxt have given you a service that does the unimaginable! You can change your ’status’ messages (among other things) at different social networking sites around your neighborhood.

HelloTxt describes themselves as

HelloTxt is an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in a simply and simultaneous way.

That’s pretty much how I’d described them because it’s not just ’status’ messages that you can update. We are talking Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plaxo, and Tumblr among others.

[via]

While using Prism for Basecamp I ran into an annoying little problem that all the icons from Prism are the default ‘world’ type of icon. I hated this plus it was hard to distinguish the different applications on my desktop. So I found a way to remedy this situation.

First I went out and tried to find some high quality icons for Basecamp. Low and behold… 37 signals themselves have provided some decent rez icons to be used for just this occasion. There you can find icons for Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise.

Fantastic! Now all we need to do is open your favorite photo editor and size these PNG files down a bit. I resized to a width of 128px and let the height auto populate via keeping the proportions. Save that back out as a PNG file and we’re off to the next step.

Now we are going to take that PNG file and upload into a mega useful little web app from Punk Labs called ConvertIcon.

It’s main function is to turn any PNG file into an ICO file and vice versa. Once you are there browse for your file using the “Upload a PNG or ICO” option. Almost immediately you will be shown a download link to grab your spankin’ brand newly converted .ico file.

Put that file somewhere on your machine. I created a folder under my Windows directory called Icons (figured it was the most logical place). Now go to your bland old application icon and right-click and then select properties. Click ‘Change Icon’ and then ‘Browse’ for your newly created .ico file. Click ‘OK’ once you’ve found it and then ‘Apply’. That’s it! You are the happy recipient of a brand new awesome application icon.

These instructions will work with any app (Prism or not) and with any image as long as you like the pic… go ahead and try it.

Download Prism for Windows, Mac and Linux