Something not so nerdy today...

Tags: art
Posted 55 days ago.

Found this via the blog of my favorite indie t-shirt label online shop. Roland Brueckner's website, featuring scanned postcards with extraordinary hand made drawings from the artist himself.

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Deploying Rails (2.0) to Mongrel with Capistrano 2.1

Tags: capistrano, mongrel, ruby on rails
Posted 439 days ago.

Capistrano 2.1 includes some major improvements over the 1.x branch, so everyone should start using it right away. Yet it doesn't work with Mongrel out of the box and it's most likely not backwards compatible with your old deploy recipes. Since there is no official documentation on how to get going with Rails and Mongrel, I put together these instructions.

Old, ugly Fish and other Technologies

Tags: apple, geek culture, squid
Posted 575 days ago.

After watching Steve Jobs’ Keynote address on WWDC 2007 it gets more evident to me to me what many people are already thinking: technologies and scientific theories are much like items of pop culture. It’s all about who wears it and it’s new shiny appearance.

RubyRobot Theme for Textmate

Tags: mac os x, ruby on rails, textmate
Posted 675 days ago.

A color theme for my favourite text editor Textmate. Easy on the eye and optimized for working with Ruby on Rails, HTML, PHP and Javascript files. Colors appear a bit too bright with Safari in the screenshots, but that seems to be the old color profile guessing issue.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails 1.2 Released

Tags: ruby on rails
Posted 719 days ago.

It's there finally: Ruby on Rails 1.2 as been announced today. Read all about it in the official announcement on the Rails weblog. I have upgraded Rails on my development box and everything runs smooth so far.

5 Tips For Faster Loading Web Sites

Tags: apache, optimization
Posted 726 days ago.

Recently I came across Aaron Hopkins' Optimizing Page Load Time article. It explains in depth how you should optimize your web pages for a faster browsing experience. It's full of brilliant theory, but not to so much about practical tips for the average blogger. So here is a list of 5 things you can do to optimize your web pages without having to redo your site design or set up distribution caches around the planet. It helped me to reduce load time of this web site by about 70% on average.

A MySQL Abstraction Class For PHP

Tags: database abstraction, mysql, pear, php
Posted 738 days ago.

Over the time I have been working with PHP, I built a library of useful classes for my projects. I have always wanted to publish this library freely. It will take some time to clean up the code base and comments, but if someone has use for it, then I will be glad to do it.

Spoofing the User Agent with Safari or Firefox

Tags: access_log, apache, awstats, firefox, safari, statistics, user agent
Posted 749 days ago.

If you're a web designer or administrator and frequently have to access your own web pages, it is useful to hide your own requests from the web server's statistics generated by a tool like Awstats. For dial-up users it is common practice to ignore a subnet's IP range like this:

Protect Your Web Server From Spambots

Tags: apache, ip ban, iptables, spambots
Posted 753 days ago.

Since moving from shared hosting to a virtual server, I felt I had to do something about the endless numbers of robots that are harvesting my sites for email addresses, stealing content or running security scanners on my web server to find exploits to report to their human owner. This is the solution I came up with:

Apache 2.2 With Load Balancing For Mongrel + Ruby on Rails

Tags: apache, deployment, load balancing, mongrel, php, ruby on rails
Posted 776 days ago.

You would like to set up a Mongrel cluster for your Rails application, running on top of Apache 2.2 with fancy load balancing enabled, but your Linux distro features only an older version of Apache?

This article will take you through compiling the software for yourself. Just make sure you have all the tools installed, such as a C-Compiler and GNU make. If you are unsure what to install, look for a meta-package called "Devel" or "Development", that will install all the necessary packages for you.