Sending e-mail from your local Sinatra application is painless with Adam Wiggins’ Pony. Unfortunately, Heroku doesn’t support sendmail, and if, like me, you rely on GMail or Google Apps for free SMTP, you’re out of luck – standard Pony doesn’t support SMTP/TLS.

After numerous attempts at getting GMail to work for Pris.ma, and browsing countless other blogs, I found a solution that works for me. Nothing against all the others out there, but all I know is what I did.

On my development server/computer I use rvm to manage my Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 installation. I use 1.8.7 for master pris.ma.

I hope that helps anyone else in my situation.

There’s certainly a wealth of file-sharing websites and utilities, but the majority of them are needlessly complex. They make you create an account, login, solve a puzzle, or navigate a set of interface elements. Pris.ma is a application service appliance web thing that skips all that. It also offers smpl url shrtning, for the twitter users among us.

Pris.ma was also my first success at a web application in Ruby. I’ve tried many times to start and finish a Rails project, without success. With hundreds of files, and a dozen directories, the framework is waaay to distracting. I like to get to work. PHP has served my needs until now, but I always recognized that I could use something not only more flexible, but also more social. There are tonnes of libraries and utilities created for PHP, but the community is large and really diverse. Normally, diversity is pretty great, but in the case of PHP, the diversity includes a lot of poor code.

If you had tried to use the ‘bad code exists in the ecosystem’ argument with me months ago, I’d refute it — and it’d likely be a pretty good denial. Nevertheless, after discovering the world of Ruby and the easy-to-use gems and documentation with them, I’m hooked.