Hoptoad (for Rails)

So, why call it Hoptoad? From their blog...

For the academically curious, the word “hoptoad” is railroad industry slang for a derailed train. At least, it used to be when the railroad industry had slang.

Yeah, that’s not what I thought it meant either. But it turns out that Hoptoad is a particularly clever name, considering that it metaphorically signifies a Ruby on Rails application getting derailed. Maybe that will make more sense to you in a minute.

No matter how hard us web developers try and build solid applications, things go wrong. And get this, sometimes we don’t even know! Aha! The perfect solution: Exception Notifier. Now, I can get an email when any un-handled exception occurs. Perfect!

Eh, not really. Exception Notifier is a little obtrusive in the sense that it sends every single error to your email. And yes, you could setup a special account just for that, and blah-biddy-blah, but at the end of the day you’re still parsing text in an inbox. Good? Yes. Great? Maybe. Perfect? Hardly.

Enter Hoptoad. I don’t know how many of these things exist (except for this other one), but man, what a brilliant idea. Instead of sending the exceptions to your inbox (which is hardly the ideal place to read through them), it uses a web-service. And it posts to a real deal web application where its sole purpose is to merely provide an interface (and a very clean one at that) around your exceptions. It allows you to setup several projects, mark exceptions as resolved, look at a frog (er, toad), and there’s word of a few more bells and whistles on the way.

It was officially released yesterday, so go on and ride the toad (as they say). I’ve already incorporated it into Golf Trac and a few other projects of mine, so I can vouch for it’s slickness.

This definitely scratches my itch with exception notification, so thanks, Thoughtbot.