Engine Yard – Rails Hosting Nirvana
Most of my daylight hours are spent as CTO/lead-coder/graphics-monkey of a start-up I’ve been with for a couple of years: Dialed In. This is a Ruby On Rails application and that means we hit the usual problem with Rails of finding a good hosting service. There aren’t a whole lot of top-shelf options in this area yet and, back when we started, there were even fewer. At that time Engine Yard (“EY”) had a waiting list of a week or more to get service and we didn’t have the time, so we went with another provider who was technically as good, but could fulfill our server needs more or less same-day.
Now fast-forward a couple of years. Our provider starts to have some performance issues, one of which ends up costing us half a week of down-time to move our server image to a new physical server. Support starts to get slow and, while responsive, we get the impression that they’d rather we figure stuff out on our own. They have great technology and, if we were a large company with a full IT staff, it’d be great fun to play with.
But we’re not. We’re a small outfit where everyone does 3 or 4 or 20 jobs and messing around with complex server configurations is simply not good for business. Every hour one of our developers spends trying to configure the server is an hour they’re not spending writing code.
So we just recently moved the whole deal over to Engine Yard. In a word, I was astounded by the reception we received. For starters, their slice hosting comes with free accounts on GitHub (Git hosting), Beanstalk (SVN hosting), Lighthouse (ticket/project-management system), and New Relic (application analytics). So basically all the services we needed, or were paying for elsewhere, were now included in our basic hosting fees. Email is hosted on MailTrust – which works pretty well, even though it’s based on a Microsoft platform. But using MailTrust we can suddenly send email to people on AOL, so that’s a good thing.
Chrome
The new Google Chrome browser is a really nice piece of technology. Google has an uncanny knack for building applications which are fast, light, and smart. The search/address field is a very well done. Type whatever you want in there and get a list of likely matches. If nothing fits, hit return and go search for it. When you start using it, you wonder why this wasn’t the way it was at first.
Being able to turn any tab into a launchable desktop application is also great. It means I can now retire Prism from my Windows machine as Chrome does a better job – especially on GMail, Google Docs, and so on – go figure.
The minimalist interface gets in the way in some cases – like trying to figure out how to manage bookmarks. And if you’re used to the features you can end up with in Firefox once you load up all your add-ons, Chrome may be a downer. Because it does what it does – it does it fast and reliably, but that’s all it does.
But that isn’t bad. Use Firefox when you need your add-ons for downloading video or inserting BB-codes into message boards. Use Chrome for your web applications where you want them launched fast and you don’t need anything else getting in the way.
The one huge, huge problem with Chrome … it’s Windows only. Of course, this makes sense given the market share of That Platform. But still. The ‘Net runs on Linux and most of the best design work is done on the Mac. The opinion-makers don’t like on Windows 24×7. I’m sure Google will correct this.
In summary, Chrome is the ideal browser for accessing web-based applications (version control, project management, email, billing systems, and so on). It’s worth a shot and, while it may not take market share away from Internet Explorer, every user who can be lured away from it can be considered a “win” for web designers.
ShoveBox
If you’re doing code development on a Mac, especially if you’re bouncing onto your web server a lot, there are a lot of little commands and passwords that you need to keep track of. SSH passwords, SVN passwords and accounts, commands for SVN, Rails, Apache, mysql, etc. This is on top of the snippets of text for running the Mac itself and all the various signatures, quotations, recipes, contact information and other endless pieces of data you not only need to store, but be able to quickly retrieve but paste quickly into a browser, email, or shell window.
Enter “ShoveBox“, a great little menubar utility which keeps all this stuff close at hand. There are a lot of clipboard managers, but ShoveBox’s “Organize” window makes the difference. It allows all the clipping to be organized and colorized any way you like. This makes it real easy to track down that Subversion command for creating a branch you only use once or twice in six months – and then just drag-paste it into your terminal window.
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Treatment-Programs.com Launched
This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com.
This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application. This also benefited the application by providing a nice view-caching mechanism to increase performance.
Adodb’s ActiveRecord implimentation was used for the “M” part of the design. This put everything on a nice, solid database model which would also allow for migrating to some other platform should the need arise.
Throw in a splash of JQuery here and there, and some other JavaScript controls and voilà.
WordPress Conversion Underway
WordPress 2.5 2.6 was released this week and it was so nice that I decided it was worth converting my old Joomla installation over to WordPress for the main Silicon Chisel site. Another incentive is that my personal blog is also in WordPress – as well as a few other sites I manage, so it just generally eases the maintenance load.
The first cut over went pretty well, aided by the “MAMBO2WORDPRESS IMPORT WIZARD“ script by Rodney Blevins which – with some modifications for table names and the like – at least allowed me to get the primary content into WordPress.
It will likely take another week or so to get everything settled in, and finalize the plugins – but then I should be able to get back to writing about technology. Some topics I plan to cover soon include:
- Reviews of the Mac web design packages RapidWeaver and Sandvox.
- A look at the “big three” content management systems – well, at least as far as I see it, anyway – Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
- Some of the new Web 2.0 sites I’ve been beta testing.
