New Site for Ruby on Rails plugins
Posted by Sam
I've spent the last 20 minutes or so playing on Railsify!. It's a new site dedicated to Ruby on Rails plugins. It's not the first site of it's kind and certainly not a comprehensive list of plugins yet, but it does have one really useful feature. You can create a list of favorite plugins. I can't tell you how many times somebody has asked me about what plugin I used for tags or for this feature or that feature and unless I've got a project open that is using that plugin I can't remember. This way I can keep my favorites all in one place and call them up anywhere I have web access.
Tags: rubyonrails
Lee National Denim Day
Posted by Sam
Many people who visit this site know that I am responsible for some pretty good size websites. Some of the clients that I have administered websites for include Sonic, Lee Jeans, Honeywell and the Kansas City Chiefs to name a few. But one of the sites I'm most proud of right now is Lee National Denim Day. I didn't create the site. I'm just the one who gets notified at 3:00am if it stops working. Anyway, this cause is a little more personal for me because my mom is a cancer survivor. I'd encourage everybody to consider donating to this cause and as a bonus most companies will allow you to wear jeans on October 5th when you donate at least $5 to the Denim Day cause.
Below is a short video for Denim Day. I encourage everybody to watch it and pass it along.
Tags: life
Why is Apache SO annoying?
Posted by Sam
I guess I've been getting spoiled by LiteSpeed's excellent web server lately because after working with Apache for about an hour I'm thoroughly annoyed. Why do you need to tell Apache that you are going to use it for virtual hosting? Seriously? Every web server I've seen in the last seven or eight years has been configured for virtual hosting. Does Apache still need a directive for that? And why on earth does the entire web server fail to start when you forget to create a directory for the log files? At most I could see not starting that site. And that's at most. I didn't realize how annoying Apache is until I switched to something else. IIS is just as annoying, just in different ways. LiteSpeed on the other hand is outstanding. For those of you jumping through Mongrel and Apache hoops for your Rails deployments I strong recommend you look at LiteSpeed. It's much nicer and a LOT faster than Apache.
MySQL Replication Adapter for Rails
Posted by Sam
A few weeks ago Rapleaf released an adapter to handle MySQL replication inside Rails. Many Ruby on Rails users will remember a while back Dr Nic released Magic Multi-Connections that allowed Rails applications to talk to more than one database at a time.
I have to say that I much prefer the syntax of the Rapleaf adapter. In my mind it's a better way to handle MySQL slaves. Although I do have a couple of complaints. For starters, MySQL Replication Adapter is just that. A MySQL Replication Adapter. I'd like to see the same code available for all databases. Dr Nic's Magic Multi-Connections gem does it and it seems like something that should be database agnostic. My other nit pick is that you must use the syntax below to send queries to your slaves.
MyModel.find(:all, :use_slave => true)
I like that using the slaves for all reads isn't an all or nothing affair, but it seems to me that
Tags: rubyonrails
Very impressive snowflake
Posted by Sam
Perhaps the most visible part of my job is keeping dozens of web sites up and running. Some of them are very high profile sites and some of them are very obscure. One of the most surprising sites is a site that my company (Barkley) did several years ago. It's called Make-a-Flake. Year after year it continues to get millions of hits with no marketing of any kind.
The basic idea behind the site is that it tries to replicate the paper snowflakes we all made as kids in grade school. If you've used the site you know how difficult it can be to make a very coo flake and even more difficult if you are trying to recreate a particular design or image. And that brings us to a flake I came across today. The flake is below and if you've ever watched South Park you know exactly what the creator of the flake was making. I count no less than five distinct images carved into this snowflake and the main image is that of Kyle from South Park. Go try and make a snowflake and you will really being to appreciate how difficult this snowflake truly is. Have other great snowflakes? Leave them in the comments.
Tags: web