Steve Spalding of Crossing Gaps interviewed me a short time ago for his Really Great Stories podcast. We had a great conversation that revolved around transparency and social media. Listen to the podcast and let me know your take on the subjects we covered.

In episode 4 of Rock the Job, Nick and I show you how to get off the Internet and out into the real world.

The headline reads:

Starting June 8th, we’re giving away 30 iPhones in 30 days via Twitter.

The fine print says:

Winning prize will include a $199 gift certificate to the Apple store, which may be used toward the purchase of an 8GB iPhone, or toward any other official Apple products or services.

I’m calling shenanigans Squarespace and what is misleading marketing. I’m happy to see that Mashable jumped on this last week. Unfortunately,as usual, a lot of people didn’t read the fine print, and tweeted Squarespace in the hopes of winning an iPhone, not a gift certificate. Check out the article on Mashable for why this is a big deal. Here’s a hint: look at the upgrade path for current iPhone users.

For me, this steps over the line and goes right into deceptive marketing territory. Marketers today know that most people don’t read the fine print, so it’s easy to catch them. So why do people hate marketers? I wonder why.

What do you think? Did they cross the line? Should marketers be responsible for disclosing the details to those they market to, or is it the responsibility of the consumer?

In episode 3 of Rock the Job, Nick and Rob talk about how to turn yourself into a celebrity.

We had planned to move scrum’d last night to a new host, however, during the move something happened with the database server and we had to perform a restore of the last backup. Everything should be in place as the backup that was restored was from 15 minutes before we began the server move.

We are planning to move scrum’d on Wednesday night around 11 PM EST. This should take only an hour or so and scrum’d should be down for a few hours tops as the main factor is the DNS update.

Thank you for your patience while we get scrum’d onto the new server.

Most readers can probably skip this, but I’ve recently been asked about setting up a rails development environment and figured it would be nice if I had somewhere to point them with an up-to-date, concise list of steps to get up and running. I believe the following is the easiest, most straightforward way to start with rails on OS X:

Make sure you have XCode installed. This is so you have the necessary compilers and libraries. You can find it on your OS X install DVD, or download it here.

Install macports. This gives you a FreeBSD-like “port” command for installing open-source software that has been ported to OS X.

Time to install ruby! You can do this via macports in the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal):

sudo port install ruby

You should go ahead and install wget too. It’s handy. Plus you’ll need it for the next step:

sudo port install wget

The package manager for ruby libraries is rubygems. The macports version is usually outdated, you can install it from source by going to: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems/, clicking “download” for the “rubygems” package, then finding the most recent “.tgz” release, and copying the url. Now, in terminal, run these commands to unpack and install (the rubyforge url I’m using is the most recent at the time I wrote this):

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/56227/rubygems-1.3.3.tgz
tar -xzvf rubygems-1.3.3.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.3
sudo ruby setup.rb

Now this should show you the version number you just installed:

gem -v

Before we start installing gems, go ahead and install mysql:

sudo port install mysql5 +server

It will end by giving you some commands to run to initialize the database and set it up to auto-run on boot. Go ahead and run those commands.

Then install the mysql bindings for ruby:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

Lets install rails!

sudo gem install rails

This will install rails and all dependencies. When it’s done you should have a “rails” command in your path. You can use that to initialize your first app:

rails myapp

That will create a shell application with all the necessary files and directories. Hop in there and fire up a development server:

cd myapp
ruby script/server

This will leave the server running in the terminal. To stop the server, type ^c (Ctrl-C).

Now fire up a web browser and visit: http://localhost:3000/ You should see a rails welcome page with some instructions for getting started. Have fun!

I thank Facebook for opening up the land grab at 12:01 EST rather than making me stay up until 3 AM (which I probably would have cause that’s how I roll). I was able to grab robertdempsey, and beat out the other 112 folks with the same name as me. You snooze you lose my friends.

Mashable was reporting from Facebook HQ and has some video taken during the feature launch. The numbers are incredible. There were 200,000 usernames registered in the first 3 minutes, and within 15 minutes there were half a million.

Were you one of them? Do you even care?

You should care. In the next episode of Rock the Job, Nick and I will be talking about creating your personal brand. Grabbing your username on Facebook is a part of that personal branding. Stay tuned for the Monday episode and learn all about it.

Consumer confidence is shaken, and rightly so. Transparency is the key to rebuilding that trust.

In order to use Cucumber to test a site that uses subdomains to scope things like user accounts, add something like this to your relevant step:

Given /^An account$/ do
  account = Factory(:account)
  host! "#{account.subdomain}.example.com"
end

and if you’re using SubdomainFu, make sure the tld_size for your test environment is set to 1 (or whatever is appropriate). By default it is set to 0. You can do this in features/support/env.rb:

SubdomainFu.tld_size = 1

Now any path built after that Given will use the account’s subdomdain in the request.host.