NodeJS seems to be all the rage these days so I thought I'd try to test-drive an app, then deploy it on my CentOS server.

In this post I'll describe how I set the server up for a very simplistic deployment with Apache and Forever.

At Broadstripes we have a handful of gems that we use internally, but we don't want to publish them on a public site like RubyGems.org. In this post, I'll describe how I setup a simple, static gem server with basic auth and a simple capistrano recipe I added to our gems in order to publish them.

In this post I'll describe how you can get setup to develop an app backed by an Oracle database using Ruby on a Mac. Specifically I'll cover:

• How to install and configure a pre-built VM with Oracle running
• How to install the Oracle instant client on OSX Lion
• How to compile a 32-bit version of Ruby 1.9.2 w/ RVM
• How to connect your Ruby app to the Oracle database using ruby-oci8

I recently wanted to some blog comments through Akismet's spam filter. I noticed that there were a number of plugins and gems on Github, but it seemed to me that it was overkill to add a gem dependency to my app just to make a simple http call. In this post I'll describe how to interact with the Akismet api with a simple, home-rolled Ruby client.

I recently wrote a background job that looped over thousands of ActiveRecord objects, and it took about 45 minutes to run. In this post I'll describe how I cut that down to 1 minute by using hash lookups.

I recently decided to revive this blog, but I didn't want to continue using Mephisto for my blogging platform. I wanted to be able to write my blog posts in markdown or Haml, and store all meta-data about the posts in the Haml template. In addition I wanted to have an ActiveRecord-esque interface for blog post meta-data. In this post, I'll describe how I used Haml filters and ActiveHash to create this blogging platform.

Rails.cache rocks, but it can be tricky to set it up for development mode. For my purposes I need to:

• Keep config.cache_classes to false so that I don't have to restart my server while I develop
• Cache all kinds of objects, not just strings
• Be able to invalidate the cache easily from cron scripts or other offline processes
• Test caching locally before deploying

I recently discovered how easy it is to view my local development websites on multiple OS's using VMWare. I use this primarily to see how awful my apps look in IE. Here's how you can do it too:

There's a new effort underway to add tutorials to the Rails API documentation. Here's the first draft of a tutorial I just wrote describing how to create plugins.

I love demo apps. When coutenay came out with his rails demo app I learned a lot. I've since created a few feature-specific demo apps and I hope that others can learn something from them:

Here is a list of quick tips that I find helpful using Ruby and Rails, inspired by the Railscasts Contest

I like using Ferret and acts_as_ferret to add full-text search to my models in Rails in a database-independent way. I've had a very difficult time getting this to work smoothly with my deployment process because the ferret server needs to be run in a separate process.

It took me a while to figure out how to try to contribute to Rails now that it's on Lighthouse / Github. Here's what I do now, and it seems to work:

If you are running Rails Edge from github, you can now get Super Sexy Migrations, like this:

I was very pleased to learn earlier tonight that acts_as_state_machine has become infinitely hipper.

A few weeks ago I was hired to build a simple event registration form. The requirements were that users needed to be able to:

• Register multiple attendees for the same organization in one step
• Specify a meal preference for each attendee, using radio buttons

In this post I will describe a plugin that extends the functionality of Rails labels.

I've seen it time and time again - it all starts with a 70-page RFP from a non-profit that wants donor-relation management, content management, events management, complete real-time integration with their legacy systems, web services integration with their partners, mass-email capabilities, online donations and an online store, real-time tracking of the work they are doing in the field updated from satellites. They want a quote, and they want it now. The cheaper the better.

I just ran across a problem that I'm sure very few other people will encounter, but if I can help just one googler....

I recently needed to build a page that had a paginated list of items. I immediately did what I always do for pagination and grabbed the will_paginate plugin (also released as a gem). 2 lines of code later and pagination was working.

In a previous post I wrote about how to get git installed on CentOS. Now that git is installed it's time to actually set up a remote repository with git. In this tutorial I'll explain how to:

• create a git user on the remote server and configure the new git user correctly
• configure the deploy user correctly
• create a rails app locally and push it to the remote git server
• set up capistrano for deploying the app using git

This is the first in a series called "Bootstrap Your App" where I'll detail how I've set up my local development environment to get new rails sites up and running quickly using "sake":http://errtheblog.com/posts/60-sake-bomb and generators.

A few days ago I read that mephisto 0.8 was released and that all of the cool kids were grabbing it from the git repository. I promptly got hip to git from John Nunemaker's post on git and github and grabbed the peepcode screencast to get started.