AJ Morris

Recently I started a quest for looking for some sort of a dedicated hosting or at least something I could rely on for Rails hosting. I was hosting my projects and sites on DreamHost, but got tired of the shared hosting and the minimal support from them so it was clearly time to start the search.

My initial search led me to this page on the RubyonRails web page. I thought about moving everything I host to one place, but from experience it’s not cost effective. So I’ve decided to keep my low traffic sites at DreamHost (as they work really well for my low traffic sites) and move my rails sites to something else. I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on a per month basis, so finding something on $20/month was what I needed to reach.

There were a few good places to look at, such as HostingRails, SilverRack, SpeedyRails, SliceHost and something even better, RailsMachine. After looking at these and had a few conversations with other developers, I decided that I wanted someone with Mongrel running instead of FastCGI.

I liked these options the best however HostingRails and SpeedyRails offers shared hosting; SilverRack offers VPS hosting. I looked at SpeedyRails because I’ve heard good things about them, but after looking at what they offer (they have dedicated, but no prices online)I decided it really wasn’t for me. Looking at SilverRack they had a good offering however I wanted at least 100GB of monthly bandwidth. That’s a big must for me! I then went to look at RailsMachine, however seeing that they were over my price range I decided against it.

I ended up going with SliceHost, as I wanted a challenge. First off, they offered a good price, $20/month for 10GB of storage, 100GB/month bandwidth, 256MB RAM. Where’s the challenge you might say? Well you have to setup the server yourself! I’ve played system administrator with Apple servers before without a problem, so I thought that it wouldn’t be much different with what they had to offer. It wasn’t hard getting things setup, took about 1-2 hours (I double-checked things) to get the server setup, but with guides like these, they weren’t hard to follow. I did need to get a few items with support, but they had several channels (Chat and IRC channel) to get support from and I haven’t had any troubles since. They do offer backups for an extra $5/month, which I’ve found that it’s worth it. I would highly recommend checking them out!

It’s that time of year again!!! That’s right, it’s MacHeist Bundle time!! You can get 10 great apps for a very small amount of money. This year’s lineup includes some programs that are worth getting, like CSSEdit and Pixelmator! Last year’s bundle sold 16,000 in one week and made a wave in the Mac community. This year they hope to “shatter” last year’s numbers ($200,000). Some other programs include 1password, Cha-Ching, TaskPaper, Awaken, and more! So go on over to MacHeist and order you bundle today!!

This time of year there always seems to be a slew of people asking me about what Mac software I’m using, if there’s some quality open source apps to use, etc. Since it’s Christmas/New Years time, I figured I’d put together a list software I use for a variety of tasks. So without further ado, here’s my list.

Productivity

• iWork - A suite similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, from Apple. This includes three programs: Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. Keynote is a presentation software, Numbers is a spreadsheet application, and Pages is a Word Processor. It retails for about $79 USD directly from Apple.
• Office 2008 - While this isn’t released to the public till after the New year, those of us that are fortunate to have a copy of the BETA (or know some people that will give you a free copy before it’s publicly released) are in “like” with it since it’s the first native intel app from Microsoft. It hits store shelves January 15, 2008 (opening day of MacWorld 2008).
• Anxiety - This is a great ToDo application. If you’re like me, you are always creating todo lists and either saving them on stickies (use Spotlight and type in stickies to see what I’m talking about) or writing them down. Anxiety takes these ToDo lists further. Using Leopard’s technology, Anxiety is able to sync tasks between iCal, Mail, and Anxiety. Best of all, Anxiety is free, so go get it when you’ve finished reading this article!

Imaging

• Pixelmator - If you need a lighter-weight easier to use than Photoshop application, this one is for you. With Pixelmator, you are able to make photo enhancements and design logos, images, etc. with ease. It’s still relatively new, and I’ve actually stopped using it due to having Photoshop CS3, but while I was using it during their BETA stage, it was definitely something you should check out. They offer a 30-day trial and costs about $50 USD.
• Skitch - A quality screen capturing tool that’s currently free, however,sounds like it’s going to cost something down the road. It allows for you to take screen shots and pics using your iSight. You can then add text, drawings, point out things, and then upload to your FTP server, .Mac, or Skitch.com. Skitch is from Plasq and is invite only during its private beta stage.
• Photoshop CS3 - An image editor with a lot of power. It is the best editor in the World, and if you’re okay with spending in upwords for $649 USD for it, great! Photoshop is created by Adobe.

Screen Recording

• Jing - A light-weight screen capturing/recording client from the good folks at TechSmith, makers of Camtasia Studio, (the people I work for). There are several limitations with Jing, such as saving images as .png’s and videos as .swf’s but for a quick sharing tool, it’s perfect!! It allows you to upload to Screencast.com (their hosting service), your FTP server, and FLickr (images only).
• iShowU - The godfather of screen recorders (or at least till TechSmith makes Camtasia Studio for Mac! :P)!!! This has it all! It costs $20 USD and can do just about everything you’ll ever need in a screen recorder. You’re able to record your mic and even your application audio! You can check it out here.

Web Development

• Cyberduck - An open-source FTP client. Simple to use, and FREE!! We all like free stuff, so go out and get this!
• TextMate - The king of all text editors! For code editing, specifically Ruby on Rails development, it’s perfect. TextMate provides a lot of features the average code editor doesn’t. TextMate is created by Macromates and costs $59 USD.
• CSSEdit - By the title you would assume that it’s for CSS editing. And guess what, you’re right!! The best part of it is that it allows you to extract any CSS file from any website and preview what the site would look like with your own custom CSS styles. It is available from MacRabbit and costs $29.99.
• iTerm - An open-source Terminal replacement. Allows for tabbed-instances (although the new Terminal does the same). It’s free, so if you’d like to try it out, go here.
• svnX - For those of us who work with groups developing applications. It provides a nice UI so that you can see what changes have been made and what files are going to be uploaded to the SVN.

These are the programs I use pretty much on a daily basis. I thought I’d include a few more “odd-ball” applications that I use for a few different things. I couldn’t think of a heading for them, so I’ll call them:

Miscellaneous

• Burn - A simple to use burning application that allows you to burn three kinds of images, normal disk images, cue/bin images and toc images. It also allows you to copy data disks, audio disks, and video disks. This is a great little utility that works better than Mac OS X’s built-in burning utility.
• VLC Player - A highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast in IP4v or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
• Handbrake - A GPL’d multi-platform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter.
• MacTheRipper - Another DVD ripper, but this time rips the VOB files.
• Visual Hub - Yes another DVD ripper, AVI converter to DVD, do-it all type application. It is the one stop program for converting video to various formats for various devices.
• Flip4Mac - a codec needed to play WMV files on the Mac. Get it here.
• TechSmith EnSharpen - A lossless screen recording codec for the QuickTime format. Does cost $149, but is worth it if you want the lossless quality that this codec offers.
• Adium - An open-source Instant Message Client
• Colloquy - An open-source IRC client
• Transmission - An open-source bittorrent client
• VMWare Fusion - Virtual Machine application that allows you to run Windows or other OSes on your Mac.

If you have any other applications that you use, please feel free to add them as a comment below! Keep a look out after the new year for some tutorials on installing Ruby on Rails, MySQL, SVN, and some other development goodies. I’ll be getting a list together here in the coming weeks what what I’m gonna be working on. If you have ideas of something you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can’t pull together.

Mephisto seems to be hitting the rails community in full wave recently.  I’ve ran across it about 6 months ago, and have started to use it for various projects I’ve been involved with.  Besides Typo, this is the first open-source rails application I’ve enjoyed using.  While there is not a lot of quality themes (yet I hope), and definitely not as many plugins as WordPress has, it definitely ranks up there with some of the top blogging apps available in the market today.While Mephisto isn’t for everyone, especially seeing that your web host needs to support Rails, and you have to install it. The install is a bit tricky if you’ve never used rails before, so I strongly urge you to consider something else if you’re not a rails developer.  Although, I’m sure with a little help from the Rails community, you may be able to get it installed ok.Mephisto has some quality features like:

• Beautiful admin interface
• Slick Asset Management
• Flexible Liquid templating system (inspired by Django, used by Shopify
• ATOM feeds
• some tagging, some ajax, yadd yadda

They are always looking for help especially in some areas such as:

• API plugin
• Documentation
• coverters for wordpress, typo, movable type
• xml -rpc api support
• and tons! of ruby on rails code fixes

If you’re looking for ways to help, check out the Mephisto site and they should be able to get you in touch with the right people!

Rails 2.0 was released on Friday!!  Thanks to all the hard work from the core developers and the hundreds of contributors.  Without them we couldn’t have had some features like Active Record: Performance, Active Record: Sexy migrations, Action Pack: HTTP Loving, Action Pack: Resources, and so many many more!!!  Check out the full blown post here. I can’t wait to see what else is in store with Rails 2.0! In the coming days hopefully we’ll see some more in the blogosphere and what else there is.

If you have gotten them yet, you should be. Today Gmail released color-coded labels. I think this is something we’ve been waiting for some time to get. I have been playing around with them a little bit today and think that it’s really cumbersome and easy to use. One thing I wish they would have added in there is the option to set my own color schemes instead of the ones that they provide you with. But I guess we all can’t be too greedy seeing that they were just released today. I think it’s safe to say that they might change them to hopefully incorporate my idea.

I thought I’d put out a link to the Washington Post article about Startup Weekend DC. Check it out!! Here’s a picture from the article as well.

Today I thought I would talk about agile web development with ruby on rails and how we implemented it during Startup Weekend. This past weekend I went to my first Startup Weekends (hope it’s not the last) and had a group of about 10-20 developers work together for a weekend to create a product in a weekend. I found that when working with developers it helps to use an agile approach. It also helps to work in pairs (just in case anyone leaves early).

The agile approach to web development is defined as a conceptual framework for software engineering that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project. While there are many methods to agile development, most that I have experienced have been in place to minimize the risk by developing in short amounts of time. This model of agile web development following planning, requirements analysis, designing, coding, testing, and documentation developing stages.

I think that we (for the first time working all together) implemented the agile web development method. The following is a list of what I think we did well and what we didn’t.

What I think worked well for us at DC Startup Weekend was that:

• We had a small timeline to get things done.
• We had our group of developers that were working the entire time on building features, and others that were testing.
• We had a go to person that worked on communicating to our design/UX teams.
• For the most part we worked in pairs, which helped ensure the success of the feature they were working on.

We also had some things that didn’t go so well:

• No real documentation, although we did try to do a little inline with the code.
• Not everyone was working in pairs.
• We didn’t have set goals for certain times.
• Features were only half added.
• No real time to test with a working site that would go through scripts and usability tests.

Over all I would say that we did a good job in the time that we had. There is always going to be things we did good and things that we did bad. I think that if we were to work another straight weekend there would be a list of things that we would change and I think that after experiencing what we did our first weekend we would have some better understanding as what we need to do to get everything done, and would have a list of bugs, design implementation, and some new features to add.

Anyone that is thinking about hosting or attending a Startup Weekend, I think you should really look into this. It was a great experience, and if the opportunity were to present itself again, I would attend. After checking out some of the other developers blogs, I thought I would include them here so that you can read some of what they say as well; Chris Selmer, Matthew VB.

So I’m sure most of you by now have seen that DC Startup Weekend and come and gone. We are the third weekend in a row to have a working product in BETA form by Midnight Sunday night. It was an awesome feeling! We had uStreamed the moment that we went live and was glad to see that we had some visitors that shared that moment with us. You can see some more posts regarding the event, and HolaNeighbor!

For those that attended the event I’m glad I met every single one of you and we truly did an amazing job getting everything accomplished that we did. Matthew VB says it best that business owners need to be worried about Startup Weekends.

The last thing I would like to show you is our commercial for HolaNeighbor! So without further ado, Here’s there commercial.

I almost forgot, so I better add this now, but I would like to thank all the organizers, the sponsors, and especially the Viget Labs for housing us for the weekend. Without these fine folks, HolaNeighbor! would not be what it is today. Brian and Andy (co-founders of Viget Labs) were absolutely great. They were just as much part of the weekend as we were. They were the first ones to get there and the last ones to leave. Andy even came back when we had network issues at 11:30 at night.

Well it’s Thursday night and I’m getting ready to head out to the airport so I can make my way to DC and get ready for the weekend.  Our final 3 ideas for the weekend are:

• Restaurant-Customer Matchup System
• Job Posting Site
• Condo Buildings Social Network

There’s two that I’m voting on happening.  One thing I’m keeping in my mind is that we have 2.3 days to get this completed and up and running.  So I’m going to start coining the phrase, keep it simple.  If it’s not simple, then we probably shouldn’t be trying to get it done in a weekend.

I’m also looking forward to the weekend because I get to hang out with this guy who I haven’t seen a quite some time. I think the last time I actually saw him was in 2003 at a GLACURH conference.

I’ve also had to think about this weekend, because there’s nothing more than what I’d like to happen (get a web developer job) in the DC area.  I would also like to get Leopard installed tomorrow before the weekend starts, however, I’ve tried something like this before, and I was without my computer and a lot of files for most of the weekend, so I’ll have to hold off on it till Mondayish.

Well if you are in the DC area and attending Startup Weekend I shall see you soon.  If you aren’t and would like to keep in on the updates, feel free to check back here on my blog and here on the DC Startup Weekend’s blog.