Matt Collins

Author: Matt Collins

  • UK Hire Guide

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    HireGuru is a new site I’ve been working on. It is a directory of UK hire companies with details of companies hiring out things from sumo suits to helicopters.

  • Mulogy.com site revamp

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    I’ve just revamped mulogy.com and finally moved this blog to a private WordPress installation. Let me know if you have any problems with any of it.

  • Local social network

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    I’ve been working away on a new site designed to help people connect with other local people. It is inspired mainly by Peuplade, a site that has done very well in France. An initial version is now live, so if you have a few minutes, do give it a go. I’d love to know what…

  • Outside.in switches to Rails

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in ,

    Here’s a post about Outside.in recently switching from PHP to Rails. Interestingly, they cite access to GIS functionality as one reason for the switch. After the switch, their hosting costs were roughly the same as before and their codebase was down to just 20% of its former size!

  • Fix for “Couldn’t find ‘authenticated’ generator”

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    Here’s another little problem I was just hitting and the solution in case it happens to help someone else out there. If you’re trying to use a plugin (in this case the restful_authentication plugin) and you’re hitting an error like this when you use ./script/generate: “Couldn’t find ‘authenticated’ generator” Check to make sure that you…

  • RESTful Rails

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    Today I decided to get my head around REST and, more specifically, whether and how I should use it in my Rails development projects. REST (or REpresentational State Transfer – see Wikipedia), is all about resources. As I understand it, in a perfectly RESTful application, every object is resource with a unique identifier (in this…

  • London Startup Weekend

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    I spent this last weekend with a group of 30 or so web developers, designers and entrepreneurs that I’d never met before as part of something called London Startup Weekend. The idea was something that had already been tried out in the US, but was a first for the UK: to get a bunch of…

  • My Competitors get Dragons’ Den Funding

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    Half way through discussing my online takeaway idea with a friend, what should show up on Dragons’ Den, but two guys with a different online menu idea! We couldn’t believe it! hungryhouse.co.uk are similar to just-eat.co.uk and succeeding in getting £100,000 of funding from the Dragons in exchange for 50% of their company (although with…

  • PayPal’s Comedy Customer Service

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    Is it just me, or is PayPal’s European customer service laughably bad? I wrote to them on 10th October about a problem I’d been having. Thankfully, I didn’t really need a reply from them as my issue was resolved. I say thankfully, because it took them until just now (16th November) to send me a…

  • Putting Takeaway Menus Online

    —

    by

    Matt Collins
    in

    Alright, it’s time to talk about a new idea I’ve been looking at and have been putting through some initial market testing. It’s quite simple, really: put takeaway menus online. I’m planning to scan as many menus as possible and put them all on a website so that whenever you’re hungry you can find the…