Martin WoodUK freelance developer and mISV (Rails, Cocoa, LAMP)

Many moons ago (well, late 2006) I wrote my first Rails application, a dinky little GTD app named ZenLists.

Now, I haven’t given the app much though for the last eighteen months, and the shocking confession is I don’t even us it myself anymore (I’m currently using a dazzling array of Stickies.app windows instead which I may cover in a future post) so I was surprised when casually browsing my site stats to see that there’s been a large traffic spike and a surprising number of registration e-mails coming my way.

That got me thinking either I’ve been spammed or some web design guru has put me on a list of ‘when CSS designs go bad’ type list as the interface is pretty crude, even by 2006 standards, but no, it looks like the app has been briefly mentioned in a list from Mashable of GTD apps.

That got me thinking, I really should do what the Cool Kids do and stick the code up on GitHub or something, as there’s the kernel of a half-decent application there, even if the code is a bit crufty by modern Rails standards.

Hmm…maybe I should also open-source the ‘DigiGuide for Mac’ clone I developed whilst watching the Superbowl about 5 (!) years ago. I just dusted it down in XCode and I’m amazed to see it actually still works! OK, it doesn’t do much apart from download TV data and allow you see select a channel and see what’s on, but again, it could be the basis of a very useful app without too much effort.

Crumbs, makes me wonder how many unreleased apps are lying dormant on geek hard drives around the world, that with a little brush of the TLC wand, might be of use to someone.

Now that the first release candidate of Rails 2.0 has been announced, what better time to check if your existing Rails app might need some TLC before the upgrade?

Enter r2check, a small tool which does some regular expression searches against your codebase for things that we know are changing.

James Duncan Davidson has published an excellent essary detailing Rails deployment issues. Jam-packed with practical tips.

* Should I use CGI or FastCGI?
* Should I use lighty or Apache httpd?
* If Apache, which freaking version?
* And how do I configure mod_fastcgi with Apache?
* Should I let the webserver manage fcgi processes or spawn them externally?
* And what’s this SCGI thing?
* And what’s this SwitchTower thing?
* What version of MySQL is the server running?

Link : Real Lessons for Rails Deployment