It has been about 14 months since I attended the Building Basecamp workshop. Since then, I have completed 4 full blown Rails applications.

RQueue was my first Rails application, a spam/archival review application for Message Partner’s MPP product, and looking back at the code, I cringe in some places. But thanks to the low cost of change in Rails, it will be easy to improve upon the early mistakes.

The design faults I partly attribute to trying to bolt Active Record onto a vendor defined schema. A lot of SQL gymnastics were requires, not to mention, who knew e-mail administrators would want to review millions of messages at one time. Ouch.

CCM was next, a light weight CRM application for Mactank. This is actually the 4th incarnation of the application. Originally written in PHP 5 years ago, migrated to Java WebObjects 2 years later, and now comfortably at home as a Rails application.

The schema needs to be changed, since it relies on MPP handling the SMTP to MySQL transport. It was my first attempt, in Rails, at loose coupling of related data.

The Mactank.com web store, is a light weight store which handles processing orders for MailTemplate and other products. When I say lightweight, I mean super light. It really operates an intermediary between the static site, Paypal and CCM.

With the web store, I really focused on building only what was needed, when it was needed. I didn’t try to outthink myself or our needs.

Client Minder is the latest application, I like to call it a powerfully simple notification system. It took about 1 month of real time from concept to completion.

Client Minder sends notifications by e-mail and SMS to clients of any business. It is targeted at small businesses who need to reminder clients of appointments, event and other important information. Our first customers have been dentists, for whom a missed appointments are quite costly.

It is being rolled out in February, and I tried to follow the examples set by companies like 37signals.

Lastly, a mini application which I haven’t had time to polish, is what I call a Railet.

Rails provides a very strict domain based application framework, part of which includes a Public directory. Typically, static content like images, style-sheets, javascript are placed in this directory.

When developing Mactank.com, common chores like managing mail list subscriptions usually requires some minor scripting.

Instead, I wrapped the static site in a Rail framework, wrote a quick controller, without any database functionality, and implemented the interface elements using Ajax.

It worked out a lot better than I had hoped, so I am going to expand the features, and release this sometime this spring.

Those are the projects which occupied my time in 2005, as part of my partnership with Mactank.

For 2006, in addition to improving on those projects, I am going to launch 3 projects of my own.

The first project, which will launch at the end of next week, is Noqr.

Noqr is my take on site monitoring, with the ubiquitous unique spin.

The other 2 projects are top secret.

Actually, they are simply too amorphous to communicate clearly right now. One involves collaboration, e-mail, SMS, RSS and breaking down borders. The other is related to small business e-commerce.

As the saying goes, I can sleep when I’m dead. ;-)