I have just been reading a post off Seth Godin’s blog: Too much free.

As the market for free gets more crowded, we’ll see more and more people promoting their free products, stuff that people used to have pay for. A complete shift from ‘you will pay’ to ‘it is free’ to ‘I will pay for ads to alert you it’s free’ to ultimately, ‘I will pay you to try it’.

So what comes next after the price the market will pay for any given service is driven down to (or past) free? What happens when all the freemium services are undercut by others offering all their premium services for free? Surely a market in which the price of quality online services is zero is not a sustainable one. Or is it?

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I found a really good way to speed up your workflow: a library called autotest that automatically (and intelligently) triggers the tests in your Ruby on Rails project whenever it detects files that are modified.

This is great because it means that you can fiddle around with your code with a greater level of confidence, because you know that the moment you break existing functionality, you will be alerted.

You can install autotest simply by installing the ZenTest gem:

gem install ZenTest

And then type the following from your Rails project directory:

autotest -rails

I even found a way in which you can set up autotest to use your desktop notification system to alert you of when tests have passed or failed, making it even more visible to you as you code. I am running Ubuntu, so I set it up through the Gnome notification system, but according to this article on getting started with autotest you can also enable this on OSX and Windows.

I did some experimentation with a really nice feature in Google Analytics called event tracking the other day, and I wrote about it in the thruSITES blog.

Theoretically, you could trigger an event for almost any sort of event within the user interface of your web site. You could even do tricky stuff like record how far users get through a form before bailing out. Or even how long users are taking to get through a form on average, using the optional_value field.

Read the whole post: Event tracking in Google Analytics.

Deploying your web app to multiple environments (e.g. development, test, production) is a cinch using Capistrano. Let me show you how.

Capistrano is written in Ruby, so this is your main pre-requisite. Get Ruby and Rubygems installed, and then simply type the following command to install the Capistrano gem:

gem install capistrano

Getting your application ready for deployment starts with the following command, issued from inside your app’s top-level directory:

capify .

This two files: Capfile and config/deploy.rb. The latter is where we are going to tell Capistrano how we want it to deploy our application.

set :application, "myapp"
set :repository,  "git@github.com:johngrimes/myapp.git"
set :scm, "git"

The first part of our deploy.rb gives our app a name and tells Capistrano where to pull the latest copy of our app from. This example has us using Github as our source code repository.

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How many RSS feeds do you have in your reader?

How many more would you need to add to be on the absolute bleeding-edge of thinking in your field? 50? 100?

How many more people do you need to follow on Twitter?

How long would it take you to read all that content each day?

I can see that the people who strike real success usually do it by a combination of doing their own thing and striking it lucky - not necessarily by following the trends.

I think that there are a lot of people that spend a lot of time staying on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and web business trends, potentially at the cost of creativity and time to commit to developing and improving their own original products.

I think there is value in learning lessons from others and knowing where the market is going - but I think that one of the things that the most successful products have in common is that they all stood up to lead their chosen market in a particular direction at some point.

And you can’t do that until you quit following the established leaders for a second or two.