Just found out how to do this, major bonus, now I can twitter from my Skype account; how easy is that!

• First open Skype and click 'Search'
• Do a search for 'twitter4skype'
• Add them to your contacts

Now to authenticate this little Skype Robot with your Twitter account your going to have to send it a chat message, but in one line so be careful here.

• Start a chat with twitter4skype
• Type: /account
• Press shift+return together
• Type in your twitter account name
• Press shift+return together
• Type in your twitter password
• Press return

You should get a message shortly after saying 'Registration complete!'.

Now every entry you send to twitter4skype will appear in your Twitter stream, including fully formatted html links.

Plus any posts your friends make will appear in the Twitter4Skype chat stream so you can track what your friends are doing as well as yourself.

Warning!

Be aware though that if you post anything in any group skype chats / swarms the Twitter4Skype bot will post them to your Twitter account.

Major pain!

Only way to kill it is to change your Twitter password, or change the Group chat to a Public chat.

Practically a virus!

If your building a new web app then chances are your going to want to allow your users the ability to upload photos of themselves or friends, it’s the core of getting people to enjoy your site and feel a value within; consider it their 15 seconds of fame.

The Attachment_fu Ruby Gem

So first off your gonna need a guide, thankfully Mike Clark has helped out on this with a really good tutorial on using the aptly named attachment_fu plugin (previously called ‘acts_as_attachment’).

link

The guide shows you how to install the necessary Rails Image Processor (in this case ‘ImageScience’, a light-weight library that only resizes images, perfect!), and of course the necessary Gem.

Hope this helps, working on integrating it in a couple of my projects, so will let you know how it goes.

Captcha Protection

To stop spammers hacking your site and bots notoriously walloping your user registration screen it’d be a good idea to add a Captcha question to your Registration Form, something that differentiates Humans from Computers.

How’d you do it is pretty simple,

First install the necessary gems,

sudo gem install rmagick

ruby script\plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/expressica/plugins/simple_captcha

…this example uses the really neat Simple Captcha gem,

now in your registration form, put this in before the submit tag

<%= show_simple_captcha %>

now in your signup method, add this before .save,

if simple_captcha_valid?

..now the method will only save / register the user IF they answer the captcha question correctly.

good call,

more at simple captcha