Instiki is a Ruby on Rails wiki, created by the famous David Heinemeier Hansson

This wiki doesn’t try to match options offered by more mature products such as MediaWki. Instead, it focuses on simplicity and ease of use.

Lately I’ve been playing with it to create a public wiki and private one and the only thing I can say about it is … AMAZING.

If you know how to use textile then you will love it, you can actually use this wiki as a CMS to build websites.

I am thinking about Instiki more as a framework rather than a final product.

There are so many things that could be developed on top of this great and simple wiki. Just imaging the possibilities…. no seriously this is an awesome application.

So if you are a Ruby hacker and you haven’t looked at Instiki source code yet, then you know what you need to do this weekend ;) Don’t forget to buy your favorite bottle of wine too. Because Ruby goes best with wine :)

I’ve been lately digging in RubyForge trying to find good open source projects built using Ruby. Unfortunately there are only few mature projects out there. However, there are plenty of new ones with great potentials.

The adoption of Ruby in open source projects is as important as adopting it in the enterprise.

There are so many reasons to use Ruby to build open source software, here are few:

• Fast gorwing community of developers and supporters
• Short learning curve
• Easy to read syntax, allowing developers to understand the code with minimum documentation
• Posses an excellent MVC framework (Rails) making it a great fit for web applications.
• Supports trendy technologies such as RSS, SOAP, XML, REST and AJAX.
• High code reusability by utilizing plugins and engines

And of course Ruby is open source after all …

In the upcoming weeks, Ximda will roll out a new website called DealBurnr.com. The website is a web 2.0 approach to bargain shopping.

We took Digg.com concept of story voting and applied it to deal hunting.

Users can submit deals to dealburnr where people can vote on these deals with either Hot or Cold. The hottest deals rise on top of the queue.

dealburnr is built using Ruby On Rails and utilizes a lot of web 2.0 nifty functionalities such as tags, RSS, social networking and AJAX.