Category Archives: Grails

Grails related posts

Re-inventing Instagram with Hash49.COM

Grails Thoughts Web Design

Instagram has a problem.

It’s quite easy to snap a photo and apply filter from the Instagram app, but what’s the use of your media, if only you or your followers can see it? Digital content accumulated for years stored in the cloud with only select ones being able to see it. How about making it public and easy to navigate?

Another thing, is Instagram’s website user interface, or rather no interface.

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What is FindRoomRent.COM and why I built it

Grails Reviews Thoughts Web Design

Update: I have shut down FindRoomRent.COM, and domain is available through Godaddy. The project did not spin off due to numerous factors. This article is kept here to illustrate the idea and implementation.

Dealing with people is always hard – different characters, likes, lifestyles and a ton of other variables. It gets more interesting when you are trying to find a roommate. There are of course no ideal ones. But while you search you get to meet a lot of interesting individuals. And hopefully you won’t get scammed, or even robbed as some shady people like to “preview” places before they break in…

Craigslist comes handy, but they warn you every step of the way about possible fraud…there are as well a few other sites, but hey, what an ugly 90s design they have:

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Integrating Twilio text messaging service with Grails

Grails

While working on a first big project of mine written in Grails I needed functionality of sending a text message to the user in order to verify their identity. The choice was either go with Google Voice API, use email-to-text-message service of a particular wireless provider or look for something else.

Google Voice’s API is great, but because Google Voice itself is free you can’t really rely on it for web applications. After reaching a limit of 250 texts a day it will stop letting you send more. An alternative to it would be email to text solution – something like your-number@vtext.com for instance for sending texts to Verizon Wireless customers. However, you want to make your customer think less and therefore an extra question as to what is your wireless provider is not a great option.

After some research, I’ve found numerous sites offering API for sending texts and later on decided to go with Twilio for my needs. A piece below describes the process of creating Grails service for sending text messages via Twilio. continue reading »