Menuito: Fixing Broken Sites One Restaurant at a Time

This week a good friend launched Menuito, his company aimed specifically at helping restaurants improve their websites for mobile users. Menuito is pretty damned clever. It effectively routes around the issues most restaurant websites have on mobile devices by providing a completely separate, customizable site to mobile users. And it does so with almost no technical changes to the restaurant’s existing website and servers.

Everyone knows restaurant websites are pretty terrible. Sites like Never Said About Restaurant Websites skewers the industry one soundbite at a time. And they’re easy targets, restaurants are, because it seems so obvious: if you serve the public, and you’re heavily dependent on the public’s personal preferences and ability to find you, you should make critical information as easy as possible to access. But those sites don’t; they employ Flash and PDFs and annoying background music and all the other things that seemed like such a great idea fifteen ten five years ago when the restaurant had it’s brand-new website built by someone who really just sold them a line. Someone who told them they’d be getting something beautiful but instead stuck them with a proprietary, heavy-weight, gimmick-laden turd.

I suspect if you ask restauranteurs about their websites, owners of the types of sites we’re talking about here, very few are happy. They’re not stupid, they know people need to find them, and their hours, and their menu, and can’t. But they’re restauranteurs, not geeks. For them the solution is not simply a technical one but rather one of time and money, of effort and energy, all the things most restauranteurs don’t have an abundance of. And at the end of the day they have no guarantee they won’t simply get burned again.

That’s why Menuito is so beautiful. Menuito effectively says to the restauranteur:

Let’s solve one problem at a time. Your existing site is good enough for people at their computers so let’s just leave that as-is. Instead, we’ll tweak things so that it also works for people on smart phones. And we’ll make that particular user experience perfect.

One just needs to look at Menuito’s demo.menuito.com demo site to see how effective this can be (and do be sure to look at it in both a computer browser and a mobile browser; it’s attention to detail like that that really set the folks who built Menuito apart).

Here’s hoping Menuito catches on because as it stands now, too many restaurants are nigh impossible to use on mobile devices.

Raw SQL queries and Rails

For some crazy reason you find yourself thinking “it’d be really great right now if I could just run some raw SQL queries against my database in this here Rails app”, but how?

The saner amongst us would simply find a better way to do things but for those times when sanity is not an option*, there’s this stuff, and it works like so:

result = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all( “SELECT * FROM authors_books WHERE 1″ )

In that particular case it returns a hash containing the results of each row in the table. Pure, unadulterated query goodness, no extra filler.

(*like when you’re exporting a join table from MySQL to Sqlite without the weight of the instances it denotes. Oh yeah.)

Rails, Devise, and InvalidHash

You’re using Rails, you upgrade Devise and suddenly it all stops working with an InvalidHash error. Chances are you just got bit by a change to the default crypto algo. The solution, from Stack Overflow:

1) Remove config.encryptor from your initializer;
2) Add t.encryptable to your old migrations;
3) [Optional] Remove password_salt in a new recent migration. Bcrypt does not require it anymore.

Though in my experience the removal of the password_salt field is not optional since old Devise made it null=false.