Rubynoob

After months and months of neglect, primarily due to the fact that I’ve had tons of problems getting Typo to run properly on Dreamhost, I have finally revived RubyNoob running in Mephisto! RubyNoob is up and running on a slice from SliceHost, being served by Litespeed.

I’m planning on writing up some guides on how I did the transition from Typo and Dreamhost to Mephisto and Slicehost, but first I’d like to thank Paul over at UsefulJaja for creating the incredible tutorials that I followed in setting up my new slice.

As I’m writing this, the new RubyNoob is using the plain generic Mephisto theme. I’m planning on slowly evolving my own theme over the next few months. I’m hardly a web designer or expert in CSS, but it’s time that I learn and what I’d like to do isn’t really anything spectacular or complicated.

Since my last useful posts I’ve learned a lot of stuff about Ruby on Rails. I’ve added a full e-commerce solution to JoyLi.net by integrating it with Google Checkout. That was a great experience and I’ll be writing about that as well.

If you’re reading this, you’ve found your way to the new RubyNoob (or your RSS subscription actually figured out what happened and I’m amazed) and I’d like to thank you for stopping by. Let’s hope I keep the ball rolling from here on out!

Note: all comments since the migration have been given the date of the migration, sometime in June 2007. Please ignore all the comment dates.

One way to generate a lot of “500 – Application Failed” errors in Ruby on Rails applications running on Dreamhost is by throwing a lot of errors. Right now my newly downloaded Typo (supposedly the most recent stable version) is throwing some errors and this is, in part, causing RubyNoob to keep going down.

I’m investigating this to see what I can figure out. My advice is, if you’re running Rails on Dreamhost and you keep getting application failure errors, the first place to look is your production.log file. Make sure to clear up all errors first.

I’ll talk about what else you can do once I get RubyNoob a bit more stable.

Simple lesson for other Ruby on Rails noobs – editting dispatch.fcgi in Windows and then uploading to your website may be hazardous for your site!!

Although I haven’t had other issues with doing so, after totally destroying RubyNoob over the past few days, I’m always going to do any editting of dispatch.fcgi through my Dreamhost shell! Apparently some invisible characters can get into your file and keep your site from starting up.

I’ve also updated to the latest and greatest typo, but in the process I’ve lost the comments for the 4 or 5 most recent posts – and that sucks. I’ll see what I can do to resurrect them – or at least the ones worth bringing back.

I have an interesting article coming soon about Dreamhost and Ruby on Rails and Applications failing to start. I’m going to try to make the changes I’ll be mentioning and we’ll see if RubyNoob becomes more stable.

I realize this is probably really old news, but I'm really excited now to see the second version of lightbox! Check this link. I'm going to delay showing off my little flickr app until I can integrate this new stuff. I've been off procrastinating for a while, but now I'm motivated again.

Hi everyone. Just posting because I haven't posted in a while and I don't want people to think I've abandoned RubyNoob! I'm hoping to have an extended version of the famous Flickr example available for download soon!

When my del.icio.us rails app finally goes live, one of the features it will have will be the ability for users to associate a retreived query with a keyword so that they can easily get back to it in the future.

For instance, let's say that I get a list of my del.icio.us links tagged with the word "ruby." I edit them in whatever way I feel like, and then save my creation along with a keyword that I choose - let's say "ruby" for simplicity.

I don't want my users to have full access to the admin sections of my application - they'll only have access to create and update their query results. So, I want to give them the ability to use their keyword as part of the url. So it'll be something like http://delipaste.com/saved/ruby.

Read the rest of this entry

I come from a primarily Microsoft focused back-end server programmer background. I've spent the past few months learning as much as I can about bleeding-edge web development, mostly focusing on Ruby on Rails and Ajax. I'm really interested in furthering my career focusing on open source and free technologies. With that in mind, here are my questions:

Does it make sense for me to teach myself java? In really large, modern applications, can ALL of the development work be done in Ruby on Rails? How does rails fit in with components? Can you make reusable components with just Ruby?

Part of this is just born out of my curiosity in learning java. I already know C# pretty well, so I think learning java wouldn't be too tough, but I'm also interested in learning how java handles all of the things that I'm currently doing with C#. I'm not interested in learning how java can do the same things that Rails does - I want to know if/how it complements rails development.

Should I remain solely focuses on Ruby and Rails or will it be helpful for me to learn java server side stuff as well? Is java obsolete?

"Write javascript without writing javascript!" It sounds so zen... There is no spoon. Ahem. One thing I've read about since I've started fooling with Rails, and especially since it was officially included in 1.1 is .rjs templates and how they allow rails developers to totally skip writing javascript code. It sounded just like something I ought to learn about and then write a tutorial on...

Read the rest of this entry

Over at my other blog, TADSpot, I just posted a video demo of a new blog statistics WebApp called BlogBeat. I currently have BlogBeat set up to track RubyNoob. I think it's a pretty cool app and I encourage you to check out the video and BlogBeat.

Finally! After much trepidation and many obstacles (almost all of my own creation) I have RubyNoob back up and running. Big huge props to all the nice people at PlanetArgon, especially dgibbons! Yay! Hopefully now I can concentrate on creating some more tutorials.

Since picking up Head Rush Ajax, I've plowed through a bit more than half of it. For a relative web dev noob, I'm learning quite a lot about not just Ajax, but also javascript. I'm very happy with this book. Last night, I grabbed a copy of Head First Design Patterns. Yes, the presentation comes with a lot more hand holding than I'm used to, but there's just something about it. I'm guessing it's working on my Right Brain just as intended.

I'm almost done with chapter 15 in the Agile Web Rails book. I still find it to be an indispensable introduction. I've learned a lot, and I refer to it just about every time I do anything Rails related.

I've recently written about how to get Ajax stuff to work in your Ruby on Rails applications. However, being the noob that I am, after so many years of writing plumbing code I've not ever really grokked Ajax, much less javascript. Sure, I know what each are, but I haven't used either enough to really understand them.

So, I've set out to learn what I can. Tuesday night I purchased Head Rush Ajax. This is one of the new style books from O'Reilly with tons of pictures and nice, slow introductions into how stuff works. I'm not sure that I need my hand held quite so much, but I'm 55 pages into it and I've already learned some, so it's a good thing.

Or:

"How I got some cool Ajax stuff to work with Ruby on Rails"

This weekend, my goal was to get my first original Ruby on Rails application working on my development box. I have achieved at least some sort of success! My app, such as it is, allows a user to enter a tag from her del.icio.ous account and then the app calls the del.icio.us REST API for that tag, strips out the html links and puts them into a text area. The user can then edit the text returned and save the tag/results combination into the database. It's not too exciting, but it's been a lot of fun to get together.

Read the rest of this entry

I've turned off the Amazon javascript thing that made windows pop-up when you moused over an Amazon link. It was slowing the site way down. The difference is pretty substantial I think. Hopefully they'll fix that eventually.

Here's a link to some pictures of the RubyNoob wearing something he hadn't worn in nearly 4 years!