• Refinery CMS
• ThemeForest
• Heroku

Refinery CMS: There are currently three Rails based CMSs that I think are suitable for production use: Radiant, BrowserCMS and Refinery. Radiant is the grand-old man of Rails CMSs, but I never really fell in love with it. BrowserCMS looks like a really solid CMS with loads of features, especially features you would expect to find in commercial “enterprise” offerings. I find the interface to be quite complex, to the point where I think it will require training end users in its use, but I am sure it has its uses on larger CMS implementations. Refinery CMS is a fairly new Ruby on Rails CMS, that comes with a nice and clean interface and has the most basic functionality built-in, like image and file-upload.

ThemeForest: They have some great HTML templates, and this is now the first place I go to to find a template for a new project. Themes cost around $10-20 and the fact they charge for them, means you won’t see them on thousands of other sites.

Heroku: Probably the slickest Ruby cloud platform available today. Deployment basically comes down to pushing your code to a remote repository on Heroku. That’s it! Heroku is a fully managed platform, so you never see a shell prompt, and don’t need to worry about installing any part of the Ruby web stack.

Refinery, ThemeForest and Heroku turned out to be a really potent mixture. Refinery helped me get a few pages of content up really quick and allowed me to easily add some custom functionality. The ThemeForest template solved was it often the biggest obstacle for a design-challenged developer: Making the site look professional. Heroku made deployment the simplest thing in world. I could have deployed to an existing server of mine with minimal effort, but that would have left me with one more application to babysit. As long as you plan on deploying to Heroku from the beginning by using PostgreSQL for development, Amazon S3 for file storage and make sure any gems or plugins are compatible with Heroku, you should have no difficulties getting your application deployed to Heroku.

Now, there are other libraries that support EU buckets, like RightAWS or S3, but the upload plugin you use (in this case attachment_fu) has to support it. Previously the solution would be to switch to a different upload plugin that used another library, like Paperclip, but last time I checked, Paperclip had replaced RightAWS with AWS::S3. You might also for some reason not be able to switch to a different upload plugin.

On a recent project I was using the excellent Refinery CMS, which comes integrated with attachment_fu. I figured the problem using S3 EU buckets had been long solved, but apparently not, so here is the solution I cooked up:

1. Install sauberia’s fork of AWS::S3: http://github.com/sauberia/aws-s3 either as a gem or a plugin in your Rails project.
2. Install the attachment_fu plugin (Refinery CMS already has this): http://github.com/technoweenie/attachment_fu
3. Patch attachment_fu to generate URLs that work correctly with Amazon S3 EU buckets, by using the code shown below:

	

		
save this as vendor/plugins/attachment_fu_hacks/init.rb
	

	
require 'aws/s3'

	
Technoweenie::AttachmentFu::Backends::S3Backend.module_eval do
  # Hacked to use new S3 addressing, which lets us use EU buckets.
  # Requires sauberia's fork of aws-3s: http://github.com/sauberia/aws-s3
  #
  # All public objects are accessible via a GET request to the S3 servers. You can generate a
  # url for an object using the s3_url method.
  #
  #   @photo.s3_url
  #
  # The resulting url is in the form: <tt>http(s)://:bucket_name.:server/:table_name/:id/:file</tt> where
  # the <tt>:server</tt> variable defaults to <tt>AWS::S3 URL::DEFAULT_HOST</tt> (s3.amazonaws.com) and can be
  # set using the configuration parameters in <tt>RAILS_ROOT/config/amazon_s3.yml</tt>.
  #
  # The optional thumbnail argument will output the thumbnail's filename (if any).
  def s3_url(thumbnail = nil)
    File.join(s3_protocol + bucket_name + '.' + s3_hostname + s3_port_string, full_filename(thumbnail))
  end
end

Disclaimer: I have only tested this with Rails 2.3.5.

Update November 08, 2010:

It seems that Amazon updated the S3 API sometime around the end of October 2010. To successfully upload you now have to use a region-specific endpoint. If you followed this guide, you need to add “server: s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com” to your config/amazon_s3.yml file.

See this post for further details: Issues using Amazon S3 European Buckets.

Founded by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, and other leading international Agile experts, Scrum.org provides a complete solution for companies seeking high-impact results from Scrum and Agile development.

One of the offerings by Scrum.org is the Professional Scrum Developer program. It is an interesting take on Scrum training—not for Scrum Masters or Product Owners, but for developers.

You can read more about the launch on Scrum.org.

class HomeController < ApplicationController

  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token, :only => :post_up

  def index
  end

  # monitored by http://uptime.alal.com/uptime/
  # this will test if Rails is up and responding to GETs and POSTs
  def rails_up
    url = URI.parse(url_for(:action => 'post_up'))
    res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, {})

    # body will be "success" if POST request is successful
    render :text => res.body
  rescue Exception => e
    render :text => "error: #{e.to_s}"
  end

  # verify that POST requests are working
  # we've had problems with Apache segfaulting on POSTs
  def post_up
    render :text => request.post? ? "success" : "only POST allowed"
  end
end

Only downside to this, is that it generates an additional request for every request to /rails_up. If you run a low number of Mongrels or Passenger instances, this might be a problem.

Working with them has been just great. As a developer I just love having clients, that unasked will send me emails going:

Jesper, here’s the story:
As a customer, I want to be able to…

The site is live now and we will be adding more features over the coming weeks, as I work my way through the backlog.

The culprit is the new config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb, which should test to see if ActiveRecord is loaded.

The bug report is here and the patch “AR can be disabled, new_rails_defaults.rb should check” has already been applied.

It’s a very tiny patch, so until the next Rails release is out, you can easily apply the patch manually.

So far Radiant has been a pleasant experience and I’ll definitely use it for a couple of other sites. Initially my impression was that it had way too few features to be of any real use, but it has the 20% features that you use 80% of the time. For the rest there’s a bunch of extensions, some which are almost mandatory for any site, like the page_attachments extension, that enables file-uploads on all pages. Also, Radiant is based on Rails, so if you can’t find an extension with the functionality you need it can be easily extended.

Working with Radiant also gave me a chance to look into Rails hosting options in Europe. Most of the dedicated Rails hosting companies have data centers in the US, so I needed to look elsewhere. I ended up hosting the site on a VPS from RimuHosting, who have a data center in London. They don’t specifically promote themselves as a Rails host, but they do have instructions for running Rails on their servers and they will install a complete Rails stack for you if you just ask when ordering the VPS. Setup was a amazingly fast even though it involved a real person handling my order. Within 15 minutes of submitting the order I had an email back saying they were working on my order and about 30 minutes later I was logging in to my new server!

The site is live now at korpus-sundhedspark.dk (in Danish).

... you should be investigating your tools set and you should be trying different techniques and different ways of doing things. And maybe then, more and more it looks back into practices. And that’s not just to make you better at your job, it’s also to make you safer in your job. Because, at the speed things are changing, in 10 years the job description for Java programmer is going to be “maintenance.” And that’s just the case, just the way things work in this industry.

So, what are you waiting for? Get moving. Learn a new language. Today.

The conference is returning to Berlin and the conference will happen between the 2nd and 4th of September.

Registration will open in May 2008. Hope to see you there.

You can now submit your proposal for RailsConf 2008 taking place May 29-June 1, in Portland.

With that off my chest, I can move on to the real purpose for this post: The photo, taken at RailsConf 2007 and featured on the frontpage of the RailsConf 2008 site, has yours truly and Morten Christensen smack in the center!

Now why didn’t I think of that? Naming your kids Magnus and Frida suddenly seems very unoriginal. From xkcd.

If you need a freelancer for your (next) project, come find me and lets talk. If you don’t need a freelancer, come have a chat anyway ;)

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system—it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

and Fake Steve comments on outgoing PC Magazine editor Jim Louderback’s “Vista sucks” farewell column:

... Jim Louderback, the newly departed editor of PC Magazine, who uses his farewell column to do something I suppose he has wanted to do for ages—tell the truth about Vista. “Why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.”

... “I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system.”

(via Daring Fireball)

There is one command which does not support giving arguments in the EDITOR variable, it is crontab (which is sort of obsoleted by launchd). If you need to use it, you can create a symbolic link to mate with a _wait suffix which implies -w.

Well, as I found out a while ago, there’s another command that has the same problem: sqlplus. But if you follow Allan’s instructions, you can make TextMate work with sqlplus:

ln -s mate ~/bin/mate_wait   # run this once to create the link
export EDITOR='mate_wait'    # use in your ~/.bash_profile

Assuming you’ve already created a symlink to mate and that ~/bin exists (you could also use /usr/local/bin or some other preferred location). Now, in sqlplus simply type ed or edit as usual, and your commandline will open up in TextMate. Yay, one less reason to ever edit any text outside of TextMate.

• New iMacs. I would buy one today if I had the slightest use for it. It looks absolutely gorgeous.
• Updated Mac minis. Yay! We can still get cheap Mac servers.
• New wired and wireless keyboards. I love the wireless without the numeric keypad. This way you can have your mouse closer to the keyboard, and I never use the keypad anyway (now if they could just get rid of the silly caps lock key as well). I’ve been wanting a keyboard like this ever since getting a Mac, so I ordered one immediately—the English (Int’l) version of course, the Danish layout is completely useless for writing code.
• iLife ‘08. iMovie seems to be worth the upgrade alone. I ordered a family pack.
• iWork ‘08. I love Keynote, so upgrading was an easy choice. The new spreadsheet, Numbers, looks like a nice addition. One more family pack in the shopping basket.
• Updated .Mac. The new web gallery with photo and movie sharing looks like it’s worth the price alone, but I’ll wait for the reviews before deciding whether I’m going to be a .Mac user. I’d also like to see if they are going to support photo sharing from Aperture.
• Updated AirPort Extreme. Looks like it gained gigabit ethernet, so there’s one less reason not to buy one now.

Todays shopping spree comes out at just DKK 2097,-. That’s five copies a lot of software for very little money if you ask me—and a new keyboard too.

Update: There’s a 30-day trial of iWork ‘08 available and a bunch of tutorials (via MacUser).