One of the best ways to learn something new is to find a project in that realm and do it. I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so I wrote a web site. I wanted to learn Python, so I did a project in it for work. Now I want to get better at Ruby, so I wrote a gem. It’s usually not as simple as just picking a project though. It’s much easier to pick and complete a project if you are filling a need. So that’s what I did, I filled a need.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
ColorTail Gem
20 Apr 2010 — ericCapistrano Hangs on Mac OS X Leopard
5 Apr 2010 — ericI use Capistrano to deploy my webapps and have been for a while. I also deploy right from my laptop quite frequently. So I was a little taken aback when I could deploy in one place and not in another. It turned out that Capistrano was having issues with deploying to multiple servers. In fact, it turned out that the problem had the appearance of being Capistrano, but in actuality, it was Net-SSH. The whole issue can be tracked via the Lighthouse ticket here. I’m going to show you how to diagnose if you have this problem faster and how to fix it.
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Model Specific Formatted Search Results Using Thinking Sphinx
8 Feb 2010 — ericHaving recently implemented Thinking Sphinx on one of my web sites, I thought it would be cool to be able to search every indexed model. With Thinking Sphinx, it’s easy to have a bunch of different classes returned in the results. The tougher part is displaying them in a way that is organized (although admittedly not very DRY).
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Sitemaps On Rails
17 Dec 2009 — ericSEO being an interest of mine, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around releasing a webapp without a sitemap. The problem is that there aren’t any really great sitemap plugins for Rails. Now I will grant that creating a sitemap in Rails is a challenging proposition and one that I would not like to undertake on my own unless absolutely necessary. But I was hoping that there would be a rails sitemap “killer app” like there is with almost everything else in Rails.
So I dove in and tried a few options until I found one that worked. First I wrote some code to generate an XML file and then created a sitemap_index.xml.gz file by hand. This was very kludgy and definitely not a permanent solution. I had also read suggestions about doing it in a sitemap_controller.rb file, but that seemed just as kludgy as using a view to generate the XML. It was then time to explore the plugin world.
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