Tim Riley

Render Single-Line Markdown Text with Redcarpet

January 24th 2012

At Icelab, we love Markdown. We use it wherever we can for text formatting. In a web app, the obvious place for it is in large text areas, where we can allow complete freedom of formatting. Headers, paragraphs, lists, it’s all good…

New Relic, Heroku and Rails Streaming Responses

January 20th 2012

For Ticketscout’s payment processing, we use a custom Rails action with an HTTP streaming response. It shows the user a spinner and a “please wait” message, then periodically sends empty strings to the browser until the credit card transaction is completed. This streaming response keeps the request connection alive longer than the 30 second timeout period that is the default on the Heroku Cedar stack. The technique works well and ensures we don’t ever lose track of any slow-to-process credit card payments…

2011 in Review

January 4th 2012

Each time I come to these posts, the year just past seems more activity-filled than ever. 2011 has been no exception. Another big year, with quite a few notable firsts for me:

Dispatch's First Birthday

December 9th 2011

We just shipped our twelfth Dispatch, which means we’re fast approaching the first birthday of our monthly coffee subscription service. What a year it’s been!

Moving to the Philippines

November 3rd 2011

This Saturday, I am moving to the Philippines!

For a long time, I’ve wanted to spend an extended time overseas, to learn a new place, culture and language, and tackle all the interesting challenges that go along with it. Now, it’s actually going to happen, thanks to my equally adventurous wife and flexible workplace

Decaf Sucks Launch Countdown: Development Complete!

August 23rd 2011

After another two weeks of hard work, the Decaf Sucks iPhone app is finished and submitted to the App Store!

It’s been a whirlwind two weeks building this app alongside our usual Icelab work. Building this app has consumed me from 6pm – 1am every weekday, and all through 3 full weekends. While it’s certainly not a great example of a sustainable development effort, I think it has brought us some great results. Let’s have a look at some of the things that came up as we finished building the app…

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Tim Riley

Hi, I'm Tim Riley. I'm a web developer based in Canberra, Australia, where I work at a small design studio called Icelab. This is my blog, where I can share with you the things I learn as I go about building products for the web.

What I Build

Recent Presentations

  1. Facebook Authentication with OAuth
  2. JavaScript Testing with Capybara and Cucumber
  3. Using Titanium to Build Mobile Apps with JavaScript (audio)
  4. An Introduction to Sinatra
  5. Building your Capistrano Recipe Book