My son and I have launched a new joint online venture, selling skateboarding equipment. The new site is at http://www.skatebordz.com. Its hosted by shopify, which means its a rails app, which is what attracted me to it in the first place. It has a nice API, nice admin tool, and looks pretty good.

I’ve started to write a tool which will integrate the supplier I am using a little closer with Shopify. What I intend to do is make it easier to keep up the inventory numbers between my supplier and my store. That involves some good old fashioned screen scraping. Hpricot is handy for that. Easy to learn, even for a marginally dumb programmer such as myself ;) . My supplier does provide a datafeed for a $100 fee, which I am not prepared to pay until there is a revenue stream from the store.

While building the store I’ve come across some great Rails tools and sites. This probably means I’ve had my head under a rock the past several months, but hey, thats normally true.

I’m really excited to be uisng Heroku. At first blush, this appears to be extremely useful way to quickly deploy rails apps. Quickly is an understatement, to be sure.

I’m also using synctobase. I haven’t quite yet gotten the hang of that one, but I hope to soon.

There’s still lots to learn about shopify and all the tools I might need. Sounds like fun.