I recently posted my top 5 uses for Capistrano over at Helicoid's Blog — including juicy code snippets!
I like Capistrano a lot. It’s now doing all kinds of things to ease my workflow, from backing up servers to providing me with detailed signup statistics for each of my web apps. Whilst I’m still the only developer designing and building 4 successful web apps I need all the help I can get, so I’ve naturally cobbled together a range of software techniques to help. At least, until I can find an army of robots to do the work for me.
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I’ve just finished writing an article about how I built a single–sign on server in Rails:
Building our centralised authentication system
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Here’s a JavaScript snippet intended for Rails that I just posted over on my company’s technical blog. It displays the error message for each field when you click on the field, making it easier to see exactly what went wrong when saving a record.
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Guerrilla Software Marketing Strategies is an article I wrote for Biznik about our experiences marketing my web applications. It covers (proven!) free techniques for marketing your software.
If you find this useful I’m thinking about following it up with an article about what didn't work for us.
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I just posted this article to my company’s blog: Analytics with Capistrano
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My Rails tutorial (part 1 of 4) has been published in Linux Format 108. It shows you how to build a Rails–powered photo gallery, by using basic techniques and popular plugins.
Grab it from your favourite newsagent and let me know what you think!
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Diff visualisation: Changes
Changes is a fast and friendly diff tool. You can quickly list files that have changed in a project, and view differences between files. It also works with Subversion and Git (and several other version control systems), so it will fit right into your typical workflow. Oh, and it also has a TextMate bundle.
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Welcome to Rapid Rails Part 3: Desktop mastery, the third article in my series focussing on making Rails (and yourself) faster.
A good programmer recognises when to reuse and therefore reduce code. A great programmer applies this tendency to their own workflow. Whether you use an IDE or text editor, working with Rails can be made more pleasant and efficient by observing commonly performed tasks and simplifying them.
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This is part 2 of the Rapid Rails series. Part 1 featured tips on how to work more efficiently with Rails by making the most of the bundled and related command line tools. This part discusses how to make your Rails application perform faster, with particular focus on server optimisation. Why? Because systems administration requires a very different skill set to programming, and I’ve been often been expected to manage sysadmin tasks on my Rails contracts — and I bet you have too!
I’ve included real–world examples from Linux, Lighttpd, Exim and MySQL because these are what I currently use on most of my servers. If you’re just starting out trying to boost your server performance there are some general principles for you, too.
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Rapid Rails is a series of articles containing succinct tips to increase your productivity when working with Ruby on Rails. This is the first part, and shows you how to make the most of the command–line tools that come with Rails.
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