SugarStats.com Launches - Simple Blood Sugar Tracking for Diabetes built with Ruby on Rails
Good news, we’ve launched!! After months of development and BETA testing we’re letting it loose. Tell you the truth had we had more resources we would have launched much soon 
But hey, there is no better time than now.
With 194 million people worldwide and 21 million in the U.S. alone coping with diabetes daily, hopefully we can help make a difference and utilize all this great technology at our disposal to help keep things under control.
Check out our shiny press release
SugarStats.com, What is it?
I guess I can’t get much clearer than our home page:
SugarStats makes it simple to track, monitor and share your blood glucose levels online for better diabetes management
We’ve been getting tremendous support and feedback from BETA testers. I’ve been hearing about peoples blood sugar averages dropping a full 10% in only a few weeks of tracking. I know from my personal use that over the last few months my blood sugar averages have dropped over 30%!
Technical Setup
In the spirit of transparency I thought I’d share a little bit about our tech stack and how we developed SugarStats.
I specs and prototyped the entire app myself for the first 6 months until we could hire some developers. We’ve built the whole thing off CRUD/REST of course and sprinking Ajax/RJS in just the right places. Capistrano and RSpec are must and I have to say have been great to work with. I could never get much into TDD, I guess BDD was a little easier for me to digest.
Rails Stack
I actually started this as a personal project (I’m a 15 year Type-1 Diabetic) and learned Rails from scratch do to do. We’re using pretty standard stuff:
- Rails 1.2.3
- Ruby 1.8.5
- Capistrano
- RSpec
- Development mainly on Macs using Textmate/RadRails and Mongrel/MySQL
Rails Plugins
Putting it together we used quite a few nice plugins:
- Gruff Graphs (Thanks Geoffery!)
- tzinfo
- responds_to
- sparklines
- ssl_requirement
- state_select
- restful_authentication (Which I’d recommend, great auth system built off AAA)
- railspdf
- mocha
- innodb_migrations
- google_analytics
- flex_image
- 12_hour_time_select
- active_form
- active_scaffold (Excellent plugin)
- enkoder
- TrustCommerce_Subscriptions (Our gateway of choice)
- annotate_modles (A must have)
- acts_as_attachment (Tried and True)
- exception_notification (Another must have)
Ruby Gems
Of course we’re using:
- Rails Gem
- Capistrano
- RedCloth
- diff-ics
- mocha
- money
- gruff
- hoe
- fastercsv (excellent)
- pdf-writer
- termios (pretty handy)
- rmagick
- rspec (who isn’t writing specs these days?)
- trustcommerce (our gateway of choice)
- tzinfo
Server Setup
I looooooove virtualization, I must admit. I just see no reason NOT to use it, even if you had dedicated servers. We went with the EXCELLENT VPS experts over at www.slicehost.com, their performance/pricing was unbeatable. They are based on Xen and provided some very good benefits for us.
We have a few 512 and 1GB slices (They offer 256MB/512MB/1GB slices, 2/4GB coming in the future I hear) with them. The great thing is we can scale either vertically or horizontally within a few minutes! New “slices” are provisioned in minutes or you could also just upgrade current slices to a higher plan with more resources. This works out quite nicely for us.
We’re running:
- LiteSpeed 3.1 (Nginx + Mongrel_Cluster is also great and just as fast. LS just included everything in a dead-simple package with a pretty web UI to boot
) - Ruyb-LSAPI for Rails processing (Very fast, uses very little RAM)
- Ubuntu Server
- MySQL
- Munin/Monit for Monitoring
- Montastic for external site monitoring
It has been an awesome ride and I don’t think I could have done it without Rails, it just made things a pleasure to do.
.
Posted on June 21, 2007
Filed Under Analytics, Business, CSS/XHTML, Daily Thoughts, Design, General, Hardware, Hosting, Marketing, Productivity, Ranting, Ruby on Rails, SEO, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Web
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4 Responses to “SugarStats.com Launches - Simple Blood Sugar Tracking for Diabetes built with Ruby on Rails”
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I'm Marston and here you'll find my rantings, rhetoric and other useful info. I dig tech, photography, quantum physics and organic food. I'm the founder of SugarStats.com and thats my days developing.
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- Just landed in Amsterdam, oh how I missed my 3G. Back from vacation and all refreshed to get back to work 3 hrs ago
- SS Blog: Diabetic Chinese skiier drops out of life after the olympics…: Wow, This is really sad&#.. http://tinyurl.com/5p5ylt 2 days ago
- Yup, still alive on vacation. Finally found an internet cafe. Almost time to come back to 'civilization', but is that a good thing? 3 days ago
- SS Blog: Drivers License……Insulin Dep…bright red and on the front!!!: I happened to pull out my F.. http://tinyurl.com/6zfzys 4 days ago
- SS Blog: The Lesser of Evils? Side Effects and Diabetes Medications: Dearest Readers, do not use .. http://tinyurl.com/56uwmn 6 days ago
- SS Blog: Nick Jonas and Elliott Yamin…..livin out loud with the D: Recently Elliott and Nick have.. http://tinyurl.com/6r5b6f 1 week ago
- SS Blog: Just spoke to another struggling with costs of diabetes healthcare…and I don’t mean just.. http://tinyurl.com/6pzo7m 1 week ago
- SS Blog: Feeling Fine versus Being Fine–do high glucose numbers matter?: “As long as I feel.. http://tinyurl.com/68hfok 2 weeks ago
- More updates...
Congrats, Marston! Sounds like an amazing setup, and a product to be proud of. I hope the launch treats you well!
Congrats! New shiny rails app
Just out of curiosity, have you seen another health care Rails site which provides a few trackers including the one for the glucose level? http://www.revolutionhealth.com/trackers/blood-glucose/chart
Michael,
Thanks! It has been great, even better feedback than the BETA testers.
Val,
Thanks also. Yeah we’ve seen the one at revolutionhealth, it looks great too. There are a few more actually, some rails based some not. But I think we all take different approaches to the matter. With us specifically it is all in the UI and workflow (atleast that is what we designed it for
). The more diabetes tools to utilize the better we say!
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