Yesterday, I wrote about the crash project to resurrect this blog after a hardware failure. I'm now running it on an upgraded version of Typo (5.2 instead of 4.1), using Passenger on Ubuntu 8.10 (instead of a cobbled up stack of Apache, Pen, and Mongrel::Cluster on Ubuntu Dapper), and deployed from my MacBook using Capistrano with git as the source repository. I've been wanting to do a lot of this for a while, but never seemed to have the time. The crash gave me the motivation, and the necessity.
This article is to let me capture what I can remember while it's still fairly fresh in my memory, and hopefully provide help to others with similar goals.
Since I got the blog back on it's feet yesterday with a spiffy new typo 5.2 install, and using capistrano to deploy it. I got the itch to hack on typo just a bit.
A few blog posts back, I started adding tweetmeme "retweet" badges to each article. Although the process was fairly simple, it required manually entering the articles permalink, which required a bit of thought, and was slightly error prone.
Typo now has the facility to add custom text filters which gave me the perfect opportunity to automate my workflow.
What a long strange trip it's been
Sometime on Wednesday March 11, the server running this blog died a horrible death.
I'd been happily working on a consulting sub-contract when I returned home late at night to the realization that things weren't right. I couldn't get on the internet, but thought it was an ISP problem. In the morning, I discovered that it was the server, which besides running the blog and a few other web apps, was also running a dns server for local lan addresss, a dhcp server and other vital services here at denhaven2.
When I found time to investigate, I discovered that one of the disks was acting badly. I rebooted, and it took quite a while, but eventually I could snoop around, but when I tried rebooting again, it wouldn't.
My good friend, Mark Imbriacco, who is one of the two sys admins at 37signals, and who lives in the neighborhood, came by to help me diagnose things. The more we snooped around, the more it looked like it was actually the IDE controller on the mother board which had gone flakey.
I’ve been developing using Rails for quite a while now, and I like to try to keep my library up to date.
So far, I’ve bought each edition of the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Web Development With Rails (AWDWR). I’ve been tracking the 3rd edition through the Prags beta book program, and just got the usual email right before one of their books is going to ship to allow me to correct my snail mail address in case I’ve moved.
I have to sympathize with the authors of dead tree books who are trying to keep pace with open-source software, particularly software which moves as fast as Rails.
Some recent news in the Ruby web development community, for those who haven’t been following it, or have been asleep of late:
- Rails and Merb are merging.
- Rails 2.3 has a shiny new engine, and lets you program to the metal.
- Micro frameworks like Sinatra are getting a lot of interest for smaller applications
- Everyone seems to be talking about Rack.
The common thread here is modularity. It’s getting easier and easier to build up a complex web application using smaller, more easily understood pieces.