A fairly uneventful post this, but just to explain for the upcoming down-time. I’m moving house this weekend, and the delightful phone/broadband companies have informed me it could be up to a month before I get the cable re-connected. So expect a bit of a hiatus from this blog for a short while.

Expect regular programming to commence in 28 days ;)

So you’re pretty happy with your rails-fu, but are you using all the plug-ins you could be to make life easier for you and your users? The following is a list of plugins I use on almost all, or if not the vast majority of, projects I work on these days. As soon as I’ve setup my rails directory tree, I install these bad boys too.

The latest release of rails has made the handling of timezones in rails even easier. No longer do you need to install a couple of plugins, although you still need the tzinfo gem.

Thin is a replacement webserver for mongrel* that further improves the already lightening performance of mongrel. Installation is a breeze, performance is fantastic, but it’s still in alpha so use with caution.

Ever needed to setup virtual hosts in nginx? Thankfully it’s quite simple. Ever had to have each of those virtual hosts support nginx+SSL/HTTP? Well then things start to get a little tricky, well so I thought. Turns out it’s just as easy, but with a few caveats.