Melinda & Cristiano

I am looking for a simple Ruby on Rails hosting provider because running FastCGI on Dreamhost has proven to be everything but fast. I had a quick look at some servers that offer Mongrel instances, but these tend to too expensive as you pay a lot per instance. I want to play around with more than one app, so renting more than one Mongrel instance (you can only run one app per server) is not an option.

I had a look at some hosting providers and decided to give HostingRails.com a try. They seemed to be very Rails oriented, cheap ($3.59 a month) and offered an easy upgrade to Mongrel if this would ever be necessary. Setting up a FastCGI app on their server was easy and much faster than DreamHost. I really don’t get what is wrong with the FastCGI on Dreamhost!

Unfortunately they use cPanel, which places the root of any subdomain as a folder in the main domain. This is just plain stupid and most other hosting providers make different Document Roots for every (sub)domain. Lucky for me they have a 30-day money back option which I opted for, so no money lost. I am having a look now at Site5 ($5 per month for quite a lot more) but I am first mailing them to see how they handle subdomains. They have a 60 day money back guarantee, so I will probably be trying them out next week. I hope that this one works properly as I want to get some apps up and running.

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This blog has been become less and less important since I started heavy blogging on FourStarters and teachr.tv. I do still want to use this blog for some more technical/personal related material so I decided to give some parts of this site a revamp. First of all I updated my CV, which needed some extra information. Then I motivated Melinda to start blogging too, after which I decided to go do something else. I am currently working on a small Ruby on Rails project that will be my first mashup and professional RoR project.

So don’t worry, this blog will get some attention again soon as I still have some drafts left and plenty ideas at hand. For now I have to focus a bit on my project but stay tunned for the result. For real time updates you can always have a look at my Jaiku page.

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So, I managed to create a nice web-app in RoR in very little lines of code, and it even has user login! Now the real problem that I encountered is this: how do you deploy a simple web-app with RoR? I mean, I don’t want to put the code on SVN and then use some advanced system like Capistrano to deploy my app to 5 servers. I just have a Mac Mini with integrated Apache and 4 users that will use the product. How do I do a SIMPLE deployment?

It is just weird that an app that is so meant for developers with deadlines, it is very badly documented on how to do a simple deployment!

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I decided to take up Ruby on Rails (bit late, I know). First thing I noticed is that setting it up on a Mac beats setting up Django on a Mac. I haven’t really mastered it yet, but spend most of today trying to build a simple “grocery-list-manager” that would help me and my housemates to keep track of what is spend. I’m almost done and hope to post some screenshots soon.

For now I want to place some interesting links to get you started. First there is the Ruby on Rails homepage which has a few excellent screencasts to get you going. Don’t whatch them just once, because I noticed that even if you watch them after trying a project on your own you can still find new things. The other link is this quick overview of Ruby syntax and Rails by Patrick Lenz. Although not necessary, learning a bit of basic Ruby really helps you understand some things you would normally not be able to wrap your mind around. The last link is to RadRails (free), an Eclipse based editor with integrated browser and server. I think I prefer it above TextMate (not free) but I have just started.

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