Authlogic

Allen Walker recently needed to implement user authentication and confirmation for www.fadethepublic.com. Authlogic is a very comprehensive login rails gem, but does not explicitly provide for the confirmation of user emails. Without such confirmation, users could sign up with bogus emails, then when the system sends out periodic emails to those accounts, it could be flagged as spam. Authlogic provides a perishable_token field for every user account, which is then used by a third party library called auth_helpers. Authhelpers provides nice framework for email confirmation/validation using the authlogic library. I will explain how to install authhelpers at a basic level and demonstrate the functionality it provides realtime with the website. It’s not entirely bug free and the author is still working on it, but it is usable.

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So, SXSW Interactive is over and it was good.

Particularly, I heard that the Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour sponsored by OtherInbox and FiveRuns was good. In years past, we’ve skipped the March meeting because we used to do mid-month meetings and it always coincided with the festival. Now that we’ve adjusted to Fourth Tuesday, we will be having our regular meeting this month. Wow, seeing you guys two times in one month! Remember, you can always come out to Cafe Bedouins to work on your projects on Tuesdays at Thunderbird if you would like as well.

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