So you’ve done all the hard work. You’ve got a web server (Apache) complete with a reverse proxy balancer (mod_proxy), to serve requests to your rails back end (mongrel), that is going to hit a database (MySQL or Postgres) to generate pages for your users. You’ve even gone to the trouble of managing versions of your source code with Subversion. You know the site works on your local development machine, now it’s time to link all the pieces together up on the server and make it public.

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I first got forced into using source control management (scm) systems when I first began working as part of a team of developers and there was times we’d need to edit the same parts of the system. It wasn’t too long until those good habits trickled into the stuff I worked on by myself, and for good reason. It’s nice to always have an undo option for those time when you go “Whoops!”. Subversion (SVN to some) is the version control tool du jour for many, so lets keep it simple to begin with and start with that. I’ve included installing MySQL and Postgres as well, because well it’s version control and databases finish off what you need to have your app deployed… and because they are all pretty straight-forward

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If you’ve followed the previous article on installing ruby, rubygems, and rails then installing mongrel should be a breeze.

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Next on the install hit list is the Ruby and Ruby on Rails stack. While this is usually fairly straight-forward, there have been occasions where various dependencies are the wrong version or completely missing. So here is the (hopefully) fool proof way to install everything you will need from source.

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Now something I forgot to in the Apache setup instructions, but partially took for granted, was that you would have access to sudo. I prefer not to do everything as root, and it’s probably a good habit to get into for security’s sake.

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Working for various clients and deploying a full working rails stack on their hardware and environments is not always as straight-forward and easy as it should be. What distribution are they using? Which package manager? Does the package manager even currently have the right versions I need? So over the coming days I’m going to write a few tutorials on getting the latest software, from source, and compiling it. So intro today, with Apache.

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I was alerted to a very, very handy extension to the core of ruby called Facets

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Popular economics blog (named after the excellent book from the same author) Freakonomics has a brief discussion about a new book out on data mining called Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

It’s great to see more coverage on topics like this, and as I’ve mentioned it’s been a topic close to my heart for quite a while but even more so lately. Much like Levitt and Dubner’s book, it always interesting to find new ways or finding potential relationships between non-obvious data sets.

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Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has just published the results from some eye tracking research his team has conducted, and released some information he has suppressed for a decade. First the juicy stuff, what did he hide? Basically, that crappy design that tricks the user into clicking banners that look like anything other that banners actually works. It’s a sad day for all, but probably not too suprising.

What else does he have to say now though?

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Following on from my article last week about accessibility, usability, and site design, design blog 456 Berea Street has an excellent review on a new book called Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design.

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If you are anything like me you probably struggle to remember character codes for anything that isn’t actually printed on the keyboard. And while it might be nice to occasionally impress the ladies at the local bar by informing them that ascii code 0169 will get you the copyright symbol, I’m sweet out of luck if she asks me how to crack out an umlaut. Enter the handy character reference sheet from the guys at Liquidicity/Gosquared. Never be embarrassed again!

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I’ve been involved in a couple of small projects that hope to go public in the coming two months. Their concepts are simple, the potential benefit to the end user can be huge, but the magic needed to make it all work is substantial.

The problem with both of these sites is in incrementally building up a significant picture of a person over time, and then trying to make some intelligent assumptions about that person. Netflix have offered US$1million to anybody that can make a significant improvement to their recommendation system, so it’s not a rare problem and it is something businesses are increasingly willing to throw money at to improve.

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Another extension for RadiantCMS, this one is fairly lightweight. I needed a way of conditionally displaying content only if a page part existed and it had content. Go check out the Contains Content Extension for details on how to get it going.

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When creating this blog I took a great amount of time to investigate various aspects of the user interaction with web sites to try and find the how to present data in the best way possible.

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Another day, another extension. In my previous post I mentioned an extension I’ve released for RadiantCMS to enable staging. Well today is the other piece of the puzzle that was crucial for this site, and most likely many other bloggers out there that want to consider Radiant as a viable option for deploying their blog. Enter the Tag Cloud Extension.

Check out the main page” for the most recent installation and implementation instructions if you want to tag your pages with a folksonomy like the one on this site.

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In getting this site off the ground I looked at a few different CMS systems. That's not to say it couldn't be done entirely in Ruby on Rails alone, but I thought I had better things to do with my time than manage the code base of a fairly static site with a blogging component. Plus having a CMS system you can quickly deploy to solve the needs of any "brochure-ware" style sites is always a good thing to include in the arsenal. Continue Reading…

Well it has been quite a while in the making, but I’ve finally decided to go it out on my own. After taking a few months off traveling and to head home and visit friends and family I’ve relocated back to the UK and consolidated my various freelance and investment interests across continents into a single company, Ruby Pond. That’s not to say I’ve not been busy working. There are a number of projects which I’ve been working on, for both external clients and personal ventures. Hopefully a steady stream of them will start coming out the virtual doors in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Until then, expect this blog to be my geek soap box for anything related to the various facets of of my business and random learnings. For my on-going travel diaries from my newly bedouin lifestyle or to hear what my other half has to say check out the updates (when we actually get around to them) at Em and glenn

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