Tweaking Apache with Phusion Passenger
Carrying over from weekend cleanup, I started exploring the different deployment options available. Here are some bleak notes as I go along:
Debian/Ubuntu Specific Rails with Postgresql
I spent the weekend migrating from my shared hosting at Dreamhost over to VPS hosting at SilverRack. In the move, I setup my housing app to run on postgresql instead of mysql. I was in for a few surprises though.
Messy Ruby Requires
At some point in tinkering with a language, you outgrow simple scripts and want to organize your code into separate modules that live in separate files. It's just this little OCD code habit you develop. Since I've only been using Ruby with Rails up till now, loading and importing the correct library files have been completely hidden away by Rails convention and magic. Everytime I want to use a library named 'acts_as_giraffe', I either A) assumed it was loaded already, or B) do require 'actsasgiraffe'. But the real world's not so easy.
Flaco Crushers
Originally, this post was titled 'Ruby Markdown Implementations' and I was going to talk about alternatives to BlueCloth. But while I was reading up about Maruku, I followed a link to webgen. As if that wasn't enough, reading up on webgen led me to yet another static site generator called webby.
Flaco Rewrite
I've been happily using my own ghetto blog I named Flaco Blog. The beauty of forcing myself to eat my own software is that I can't really complain about it. Either something works exactly as I want it, or it slowly irritates me until it overcomes the effort needed to rewrite it. So why am I proposing a rewrite?