Notes about things

We decided to try Kickstarter for the first product of Stubborn Goods. We reached our goal thanks to our friends and family. This is an overview of what we did and some lessons we learned. ## Why Kickstarter? Stubborn Goods makes packs and bags. Since production requires a minimum quantity order to make sense we thought Kickstarter might be a good way to start. Besides, I wanted to experience running a Kickstarter project.

Continuing from the earlier post Rails JSON Serialized Fields, this covers how to validate JSON serialized objects from the parent model.

Route285 is a site of Colorado product companies. I have images of logos & products from those sites, but need to download and display them locally, in case an image changes later. Also, since eleventy-img supports resizing and different formats I wanted to get that stuff working too. I ran into a couple of snags. First ICO isn't supported, that was pretty easy to work around, but I still wanted a local version of the file. The useOriginalImage function handles that. Plus it's helpful for errors and SVG files. Also, since it's an addNunjucksAsyncShortcode in 11ty, I needed to change my for blocks to asyncEach blocks. That took a while to figure out as it just results in those templates returning nothing.

Sometimes I like storing a set of options for a model as in integer in the DB, but still want a nice interface to use those options in code. This is one approach I've been using.

Wanted to setup Jupyter for Ruby to test out some ML stuff. Here's the setup I used and some issues I ran into.

Here's one approach to adding API authentication to a Rails application that's already setup with Devise and Cancancan. We'll add a Warden strategy to process a Token if it's passed in the request.

The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step road map to building wealth by Nathan Barry clicked with me. It provided a good framework to think about where I'm at and where I'm going. Thank you Nathan! Below is a summary of points and where I'm at, my journey, and moving forward. Please read his article!

Owning my content and making it easy to post are both important to me and I've been slowly working to do that more. Moving my blog to 11ty was a big step in that direction. Now with webmentions and bridgy it's easier to share content. This post talks about what I've setup to connect my blog to the indieweb and some of the closed networks.

[Active Storage] is awesome for uploading images, but handling has_many_attached needs some additional stuff if you want be able to add and remove specific images. This is how I setup multiple uploads so files can be added and deleted without re-uploading the files.

Making emails look nice is a huge pain! [Foundation Emails] help by giving you short HTML tags that are expanded into HTML for emails and nice classes for styling.