McSpadden Technology Inc.

Business

McSpadden Technology Inc. helps small businesses with building their online presence. This means providing anything from basic marketing websites to full online applications. The technology that drives the development is Ruby on Rails.

An area of particular interest is that of small healthcare practices. The healthcare industry in general is well behind the technology curve, and this is true online as well. The goal is to help small practices gain a presence online, and in doing so, turn to the web for their scheduling, communication, and marketing needs.

Check out www.irmathompsondds.com for an example of the basic small healthcare practice site.

Custom Development

RiskKey Demo available upon request

RiskKey is currently a custom .NET application used for performing risk assessments and IT audits of banks. This is a valuable internal tool to the client, but it is also licensed to individual banks and institutions. My task has been to port the basics of the application from .NET to RoR while bringing it up to speeds with things like Project based Assessments, Search, and Tagging.

This application is all RESTful, using polymorphic associations, and eager loading where appropriate. (Yes there are times when eager loading everything is NOT a good idea!) On the front-end we added in-line editing, slide bars, and auto-complete text fields but still tried to keep the busyness to a minimal. While most of the core functionality is complete, some of the peripherals, user permissions, and integration tests are still to come. The site will be launching in mid to late February.

US Houses Online Demo US Houses Online

US Houses Online is a real estate site designed for simplicity of listing and finding properties. It is not slated for launch until mid February, but the development work on the site is complete and in the testing phase.

This site was developed on the Edge and uses RESTful routes, polymorphic associations, and many other features that were in Rails 1.1 and now Rails 1.2.

CMS Demo the CMS

I built a custom CMS for the internal use of setting up and adding content to sites. (This was completed before Rails 1.1, so it may be ancient in a rails world, but still serves it's purpose.) This was done in partnership with my work on the Trabian CMS.

Site Monitor View Monitor.rb

As I started putting more sites online, I realized I had no way to know when and if they went down. I found some widgets that would monitor a server, but I need something to monitor a specific site, as sometimes a specific application server will fail.

I decided to create my own site monitor. It was built initially as a stand alone ruby file, but then integrated into rails with a simple scaffold interface. The main idea is this:

  • A request is made on a time interval for a url
  • The response it monitored and logged
  • Emails are sent out when the response changes
  • Multiple urls are checked concurrently using multi-threading to avoid bottle necks on slow or down sites

I currently monitor about 10 sites, and the site monitor is fairly accurate but not perfect. (Even when I uploaded monitor.rb to this site, I had to add some notes on potential refactoring.) My hope is to one day clean it up and offer it as either an open source solution or a hosted service.

Hosting

In addition to a shared hosting package at Site5 that I use primarily as a DNS and email server, I have a dedicated box that I maintain with CI Host.

I basically started from scratch on the Red Hat OS installing Apache 2, MySQL 5, Subversion, Ruby, Rails, and Mongrel all by my lonesome. Maintaining the box is not always my favorite thing but a necessary evil when you are quick to adapt new technologies.