It's a busy week for MyOwnDB promo, as I was yesterday as the Web Startup Day where I talked about MyOwnDB to various participants, and got very interesting feedback and reactions.

And tomorrow, I'll present MyOwnDB at Boostcamp, an initiative by the Microsoft Innovation Center. We'll see what they think of it as it's not using any Microsoft product, but it'll be a good exercise in any case!

The registration form of the MyOwnDB app was simplified this week, but an information I wanted to keep is the country where registered people are located, notably to know which translation of the UI to provide next (currently, it looks like it will be spanish).

I decided to use the Geoplugin.com service, but it appears it's unreachable at this time, making for a less than engaging experience when loading the sign-up page.

I just deployed a new version of the application, based on YUI3.1 that was released this week.

Although no change should be visible at this time, YUI 3.1 will help bring the public entry forms to the next stage. Watch this space for updates!

A new improved version of the CSV import feature has been deployed. You can now specifiy which field separator should be used, and empty records are now reported along the number of invalid reacord and created records.

Check it out, and get in touch if you encounter any problem!

Rails provides a handy function to escape string to be used in your javascript code. Unfortunately, it is only available in your views. It is very easy though to make it available outside of views, eg in your helpers, as it suffices to require and include one module:

require 'action_view/helpers/javascript_helper'
include ActionView::Helpers::JavaScriptHelper

# escape_javascript is available here.

Here it is, a brand new website for MyOwnDB. It was really time to abandon the old one, which was based on a custom developed solution...
This new website is based on Drupal and uses its multilingual capabilities to power the websites in different languages, currently:

• english at http://www.myowndb.com
• french at http://www.myowndb.com

The dutch translation should be coming very soon.

I expect the design to evolve, but I'm happy with this transitional design based on Drupify.