"rails" work
January 30th, 2007
indeed.com search for “rails” in boise, id vs. indeed.com seach for “rails” in reston, va
Thank goodness most gigs can be done remotely :)
exception_notifier
January 26th, 2007
I mentioned that I’d be posting about some of the plugins used on the 12stoneart project. Here’s a nice, short one:
Tim requested that if the user sees a 500 error, an email be sent to him and me. I wasn’t really sure how to handle this and feared it’d be a tad involved. But of course someone had to have solved this already. One google search later I had the answer: exception_notifier. What a great plugin. It provides a very detailed email including session data, browser info and the exception details. Very handy.
I wish I had this running all throughout development so I could get an email of the exceptions Tim was seeing on the staging server (that’s now my plan for all future projects).
The lesson learned here was: browse the dev.rubyonrails.org plugins regularly :)
My First (public) Rails App Goes Live
January 15th, 2007
12 Stone Art is now online. This was my first Rails gig and it went great. The whole thing took about 38 days (part time) and went surprisingly smooth. Tim fed me some great HTML/CSS templates and I wired ‘em up. I think things went so well because we each got to focus on what we do best. I barely spent anytime futzing with the front-end and Tim rarely had to wander into the rails stuff. I don’t think he ever went beyond the views.
Now that the project has launched I hope to be able to take some time and blog about some lessons learned and some of the rails-ish stuff that went into the 12 Stone store. But for now, there are some more details over on my portfolio page @ briantcooke.com.
Why Won't My Mongrels Start?
January 1st, 2007
I’m running this blog on an ubuntu slice over at slicehost. To get up running fast I followed the “slice setup from onrails.org. In a short amount of time everything was running. The only problem left was that my mongrel_cluster script didn’t seem to be running when I rebooted the slice. I spent a good chunk of time staring at things before I just let it go. Then today I stumbled onto console access through the slicehost management page. On the console the problem was clear:
/usr/bin/env: ruby: No such file or directory
ruby was installed in /usr/local/bin. I created a symlink to /usr/bin/ruby, rebooted the slice and all was well in the world.
Solving this should have been a lot easier, but my Linux-fu is rusty.