Marc Gayle

I am creating compversions with blood, sweat and care.

Compversions allows you - as a designer/photographer/creative person - to help your clients make faster decisions, which makes your life easier.

Beware though, everything here is 100% unadulterated opinion.

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How to change root route behavior in Rails 3

These instructions have only been tested with declarative_authorization. So while it may work with other authorization gems, I haven't tested it so can't verify. 

Say you want your users to see your marketing site (when they try to go to yourapp.com) when they are not logged in, but when they are logged in, you want them to see something different (like the dashboard of your app - which is found by going to your home controller, and index action - 'home#index'), how do you do this in Rails 3? 


If you put an index.html file in your public directory, that takes precedence over everything else. Rails routing doesn't even execute when that file is included (as far as I understand it anyway). So, you do it like this: In your routes.rb file, change your root route to the following:


Rename your 'public/index.html' file to some other name, e.g. 'public/marketing.html'. In your home controller, do this:

Now, when a user is not logged in, they will be redirected to your static marketing page. But when they are logged in, they will go to your dashboard at home#index. Hope that helps you.

You should follow me on Twitter here: www.twitter.com/marcgayle.>

Ikea type furniture focused on comfort (Non-Tech Startup Idea)

This is an idea that I have had for a while, and have said that I am going to pursue one day. But being real with myself, there are many other ideas I have that I will execute before I get around to this one.

So here goes.

Furniture at the same price points as Ikea's furniture (or in the similar range), but rather than focusing on the look - you focus on the feel. Put a lot of focus on the comfort that whoever is sitting on your furniture feels. 

The reason I haven't done it, is because it is capital intensive. You have to either be a furniture maker that can make this stuff yourself, or have a ton of cash to invest in building the perfect first line of furniture - which is going to go through many permutations and a lot of wasted cash.

The end product should be plush, and feel heavenly to sit down on/in. It should be assemble-able and deliver-able just like Ikea's furniture, for a similar price point. Make sure that you don't compete on price with anyone else, and you focus on quality of the comfort. People will pay for comfort - see the success of Tempurpedic, Lay-Z-Boy, et. al. Make sure your margins are fat enough to keep you in business for a long time.

You should also have at least one flagship store that is the 'Apple Store' equivalent of 'Comfortable Furniture'. You have to invest heavily in the feeling that the customer feels when they walk in the store.

To that end, the killer name for such an endeavor: Cloud 9. 

Imagine when they walk into the store, they are "Stepping onto Cloud 9". Make sure that both the store and the product live up to that expectation.

If you do decide to run with it, please don't do it tackily. Do it properly and execute like Steve Jobs or Ikea would.

This is an idea I have held close to my heart for many years, and hope that by releasing it someone can run with it successfully.

This is not a "quick flip" type of business idea, but definitely a long-term wealth generation type of idea. 

You should follow me on Twitter here.