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Loudblog now iTunes compatible

The thrilling new version of the easiest-to-use podcasting cms on the planet has been released. Loudblog 0.3 sports some important new features:

  • Loudblog now pings to audio.weblogs.com and ping-o-matic
  • Loudblog now sends an eMail to the author, when a new comment has arrived
  • New (audio)comment feeds for single postings
  • New fullfeed with recent postings plus (audio)comments
  • New Loudblog-Tags and attributes for showing new feeds
  • iTunes 4.9 compatible rss-feed (cover art and categories)

Check it out! And get the best possible Loudblog experience on our TextDrive-servers :-)

Loudblog Website

·:· Posted 4 July 2005, 07:53 by Gerrit van Aaken to Scripting  |  

One clarification of what it means to "develop" on a TextDrive server

There have been some discussions about “developing” on our servers and I realized that most people don’t know my relatively narrow and specific view of what it means to develop on one of our servers.

And that the issue isn’t really about “developing”, the issue is general sloppiness and the lack of a thoughtful development workflow (most likely because of a lack of experience). When you live by yourself, you can be as sloppy as you want to be, but when you live with others and sometimes they want to be presentable, you can’t be. And once money is injected into the entire situation, then that becomes ever more important.

Most of the current development going on (including at TextDrive proper) is in Rails, and we’re hosting well over a thousand rails-based sites (many also using lighttpd). One view of developing can be defined by this:

“Developing” could mean persistently running in the development environment and leaving those processes around when you aren’t using them.

That’s pretty much it.

On more than one occasion, we’ve had to rescue someone from a huge log file that took over their space (huge = up to a 150GBs). And in my opinion, there’s no reason to actively log a perfectly functioning site.

Then running in the development environment is slower, exposes your app (people see rescue pages for example) and the problem server-side is that there is a degree of memory leakiness: everyone’s apps get bigger and bigger and bigger until we essentially have to reboot a machine to claim back GBs worth of RAM.

Running your app under the production environment with lighttpd’s fastcgi is easy, it takes adding a bin-environment line to fastcgi.server:

fastcgi.server = (
               ".fcgi" =>
                    ( "localhost" =>
                        (
                            "min-procs" => 1,
                            "max-procs" => 1,
                            "socket" => "/home/manuals/tmp/manuals-hieraki.socket",
                            "bin-path" => "/home/manuals/hieraki/trunk/public/dispatch.fcgi",
                            "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" )
                        )
                    )
)

It can also be done by wrapping the dispatch file or by changing from “development” to “production” in environments.

The main reason I’m pointing this out is that a clean Rails install defaults to the development environment, so switching is an active step you have to take.

Now is the development environment absolutely forbidden?

Of course not.

Deploying on a server follows the same model as Rails, when you’ve pushed something up that’s going to be running and getting traffic, run it in production mode. If something makes you say “hmm?” and you’d like to switch over to dev mode to see, that’s fine, just don’t leave it in development mode, turn on adaptive fcgi spawning and start telling people about the site.

Then if you’re staging and it’s not public, running it in development mode all the time is fine. But it’s the same thing, don’t leave it running: there’s no need. If no one is hitting the site and you’re going to be out, turn it off.

That all said, we’re all about developing (for example, the first version of things like subversion that we hosted was 0.3.8 …) and we’re a “hosting” company founded by developers.

So go out and make something cool, go out and make the Next Big Thing, go out and make something that’ll make everyone else go “damn, that’s nice”.

And by all means, do it here.

·:· Posted 18 June 2005, 23:52 by Jason Hoffman to Scripting  |  Comment [4]

Snippets

I love the applications that have been showing up lately: I’ve always wanted somewhere to slap up some snippets and enjoy reading others. Nice to have that all in one place.

I put up a tester from Trade Secret #1

Impressed.

·:· Posted 8 April 2005, 10:15 by Jason Hoffman to Scripting  |  Comment [2]

Routing: An upcoming change in RubyOnRails

On his weblog, David said that Routing is now in beta-gems.

The importance of this is that the next Rails upgrade here will break your applications, unless you either 1) tie your application to a specific gem version of Rails or 2) follow David’s RoR weblog closely for instructions on how to pre-emptively upgrade your applications.

Routing has some real advantages to it, one of which is that there’s about a 98% chance that Rails application hosting here will have a lighttpd-fastcgi offering (and be our the preferred way of hosting them) and anything to simplify the Rewrites situation helps.

To lock your rails app to a specific gem version, you can modify your config/environments.rb file {a disclaimer: this may be dated, but how I would do it in past versions of Rails—locked to 0.9.1 in this case}. Find

	
#Require Rails gems.
require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'activerecord'
require_gem 'actionpack'
require_gem 'actionmailer'
require_gem 'rails'

Change it to the versions you are using, for example

	
#Require Rails gems.
require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'activerecord', '<= 1.30'
require_gem 'actionpack', '<= 1.1.0'
require_gem 'actionmailer', '<= 0.5.0'
require_gem 'rails', '<= 0.9.1'

If you’re not sure about the version numbers, run gem list and take a look at the gem versions installed, and if you’ve never done anything like this to your application before than you are using the latest one.

·:· Posted 15 February 2005, 05:09 by Jason Hoffman to Scripting  |  Comment [2]

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