Now, when a development studio switches to Rails, the one thing you shouldn’t do is try your best to move all your tools over to Rails. Just because Rails is new and cool doesn’t mean that PHP and/or Perl and/or Python are all ugly and should be avoided at any cost. As always, best practice is to use the best tool for the job.

I mention this because I’ve noticed that Lighthouse has chosen to use Beast, a sleek and relatively new Rails-based forum for their support. I’ve experimented with Beast, and I love it! The glaring problem I saw when evaluating Beast for our own use here at lunardawn is that it doesn’t have *any* spam protection, as seen at the spam-filled Lighthouse support. It wouldn’t take much at all to integrate with Akismet to block most spam, and admittedly I could have patched Beast as such pretty fast, but we want to use the best tool for the job while taking away as little development time from our core product as possible.

So for us, we’re looking at either phpBB, which has a large community dedicated to anti-spam measures, or lussumo’s Vanilla, which seems to avoid spam at the moment solely based on its small market share (obviously not scalable to any degree).

• A lot smaller than I realized! About half the height of a normal business card. I looked at a ruler when I was ordering to get an idea of the size and I knew they’d be small, but these are pretty tiny.
• The tiny thing works for their purpose though, I think. Makes them more of a “quick-everyone-take-one-we-have-lots” sort of item. Better for trade shows and the like than for normal business – I definitely think sticking with the standard business card-size is better for individual client introductions.
• Excellent, high-quality paper stock. I would guess about twice as thick as a regular business card. It feels good to the touch, which is (let’s face it) mostly what matters.
• The printing (I got my company logo on the front) leaves a lot to be desired. The vibrant colours of our logo are very washed out. Looks like what happens to paper when it goes through the wash – bold, navy blues are converted to light, timid-looking cyans.
• Same goes for text on the front. The text is part of the logo (as moo doesn’t allow text on the front), and you can tell. The dots from the colour inkjet cartridge that printed the text are clearly visible, and it gives it a fuzzy texture.
• Text on the back is crisp, sharp, and most importantly, very black. Looks very good.

Overall, I’m getting more of a “meh” reaction to the cards than I would have liked – I was hoping that these could be the little “wow” factor that I’m looking for during a first impression, but unfortunately I don’t think they’re up to snuff. Not bad cards if you stick to straight type though, and really good quality stock, though I think I’ll stick to regular business cards in the future.