So it is time to be a nerd on many fronts. If you like some of the posts you have seen here, feel free to check out my new site http://www.brianbruijn.com.

Also, I have finally joined the world of twitter @brianbruijn. http://www.twitter.com/brianbruijn

It has been fun on WordPress.

So for starters I will be posting on just stuff about life and what is going on in my endeavors regarding, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails and Drupal. I will also be including life stuff as well.

Say hello and as usual, I appreciate the comments.

Brian

This one is a game of American politics.

Politiwars has been launched and after some preliminary debugging with a couple of friends I am ready to post it so that people who follow my blog can let me know what they think.

Here is the point of the game;

Select a US political party that you like (Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Socialist, Communist and Independent).  I know Independent isn’t a party but there are a lot of people who claim they are.

Select the US state you support.

Build power for your state by banking money, attacking other players, doing party jobs and purchasing items for your party.

The more you have, the more you state has, the more states your party owns the better. Which ever party has the most states under its control will be in control of American politics.

For instance, at the writing of this blog the Independents own Hawaii and the Constitution party owns Alabama.

Features include a perpetual playing system (the game keeps going even when you are not playing), a flashmap (updated every hour) that lets you see who is in control of America, each state on the map has a link that will give you real time stats, and real time news feeds from Politico, CNN, Fox News, and the New York Times.

So if you are tired of the other party running your state, do something about it!

Take if for a spin and let me know what you think. I would appreciate your comments.

I have spent most of the morning making it more useful, only to find out that my trusty killall -9 dispatch.fcgi was no longer working. Hrm, could it be because I am now using passenger? I think so.

If you are running into the same issue with your Site5 account you can do a reset on the ruby framework as well. Use killall -9 ruby instead and that will take care of your framework reset issues. A little note: You might see an ugly Passenger screen, just refresh the screen one more time and your changes will be applied.

The new addition is a fantasy wrestling component that allows one to start a career and build it. It is a time based game that doesn’t stop. As one progresses in levels, they earn the opportunity to gain more wrestling moves, holdings (items that earn one income) and the ability to fight harder matches.

So, for the past couple of months I have been cranking out the code.

Now for the great news. The past few launches of web sites have been a pain to say the least. I blasted Site5 on more than one occasion. THAT HAS CHANGED!! Site5 has really stepped up their game with regard to rails hosting.

This was by far the easiest update I have ever done.

I do not say that lightly. The previous version of the site was still running on Rails 1.2. (What a difference 7 months can make).

The latest iteration of the site was a complete upgrade in development to Rails 2.3.2.

It was a seamless setup. I had to kill the old directory and start all over. Needless to say, it works great. I have been tailing the production log file to hopefully see the first person to come to the site since the launch. I hope this is what will put me over with regard to 1000 unique visitors in one month.

Here is to hoping.

In both cases, the internet access is limited and I only have a small amount of time each day to dedicate to working on the sites I manage. I would love to actually be upgrading the sites and not dealing with the fixes caused by the hosting company.

I think the worst part of all of this is that Site5 didn’t send a notification (may have posted it in the forums, I don’t know, but who checks the forums every day) to let me know that the upgrades were happening. I was scrambling to find out what was going on.

Here are a few things I ran into.

MySQL – The storage engine hung the database some how during the upgrade. This did not happen for the one PHP site I have on the server. I submitted a ticket and they were able to restore from a back up. I had two rails sites that this issue affected.

Upgrade to Rails 2.2.2 – This upgrade would have worked great if I was not using the RMagick gem. It is a great thing that I have about 5 different sites with 5 different configurations. Some sites worked and some did not.

With the first ticket I submitted it was assumed that my site was not compatible with the upgrade and I was told to freeze my gems. This didn’t make sense as I had 2 other sites that went through the upgrade just fine. After digging deeper, I noticed that my RMagick was hosing the site. So I submitted another ticket suggesting that RMagick and the gem for RMagick were out of sync. It was nice to see a response in the ticket that said they had upgraded the gem and all worked well again. Just as a side note, if you freeze your local gem for RMagick and it is different than the RMagick version on the server, your site will fail to start up as well.

The final issue I ran into is that I use the truncate method on the home page of the CWOL.TV site. Well after doing some research Rails 2.2.2 and Ruby 1.8.7 do not agree with regard to the truncate method. I tried several work arounds and none of them worked. If you have a suggestion that will work in a shared hosting environment, I am open to it From what I can tell, the recommendation is to downgrade to Ruby 1.8.6. Good luck trying to get a hosting company to go backwards on dozens if not hundreds of servers.

For now I had to eliminate the truncate code from the site and work on another solution. It will really suck if I have to write my own truncate method to work around this mess.

Well I am done venting for a while. I hope that you do not think I am down on Site5. I love the company and when you get someone who knows what they are doing in tech support you can usually get things done pretty quickly. But if there was one area that could stand to be improved it would be communication.

I just made a bunch of changes for the wrestling website that I have been working on and finally got them all uploaded. When I went to check to see if they are working on the server I was shocked to find out that my carefully laid plans had failed miserably.

Debugging in a live environment can be a very stressful endeavor.

Of course the code works in development but in live (because I do not have a staging environment that is exactly like my production) things can still go wrong. So, as I sift through the code I start with things left in that don’t need to be there.

As it turns out I had a puts statement that was left over from debugging and it was causing the server to have some major fits.

Moral of the story, remove your puts statements before you go live with the code.

I am not sure how long this has been in place but the guys at Notepad++ have really out done themselves.

When developing in rails, it is nice to see what the development.log is showing. With most text editors you have to either refresh the text or close the editor and reopen it. In either case you still have to scroll to the bottom of the log.

With Notepad ++ 5.1 (which is what I am using) the log automatically updates and all you have to do is go view it. If this feature has been in place for a long time, GREAT!!!

However, when someone doesn’t know it is there, it is like putting glasses on and noticing how beautiful trees are for the first time.

What is more fun is to actually launch the site on time. It has been a while since I lunched a website (well, something that I have developed and not used prefabbed templates). Langorang (the language news site) was my first (since I started the home projects again) over a year ago.

I have had sites die, some are just moving along gradually (very gradually) building traffic. Others still will never be seen as a development of mine again. Gone are the days of owning 20 or 30 domain names hoping that I will build a site for each.

I have settled down and started working on one site or idea at a time. I have committed to only launching a site if there is a way to effectively manage it and I have finally gotten the instant-millionaire idea out of my head. One of my former employers used to say that it took 15 years for him to become an overnight success. I think I finally understanding them meaning of consistency over time multiplied by God. Took me long enough.

So, finally, after 10 months of development, 5 computer reformats, 1 hard drive crash and a complete rewrite of the original concept, I am proud to launch Championship Wrestling Online.TV (CWOL.TV).

CWOL.TV is a social networking site that allows professional wrestling fans host their own promotion. Each promotion comes complete with tools to manage live events, matches, wrestlers, titles, pictures, and videos.

The site just launched yesterday and the code is still in its infancy. I know there will be a lot of work to do if any significant amount of traffic starts to show up but for now I am enjoying the latest fruits of my labor.

Setting up a web site on a Site 5 Rails 2.2.2 server.

The first thing you will need to do is setup your production database. This will be important later in the process of setting up your site.

Login to your Site5 account with your favorite SSH tool.

At any point you can use the command

$ cd ~

to get back to your root directory.

The first thing you will need to do is to run the rails script with the mysql database flag.

$ rails -d mysql nameyoursite

You will see a series of create statements and will also have a new directory.

Change directories into your new nameyoursite directory
$ cd ~/nameyoursite

Next add a controller that will be used later.
$ ruby script/generate controller site index

If all goes well, you will see the script run and add some more files to your system.

You will now need to move to the config directory to take care of a few things there.

$ cd ~/nameyoursite/config

In this directory, the first file to edit is the database.yaml. I use nano, others use VI. I say use whatever makes you comfortable.

$ nano database.yml

Ok, this is where it gets a little harry. In previous versions of Rails on Site5, the only thing you had to change was the values of the production database. However, all of the extra code causes errors with starting up the rails environment. Here is the only code you will need.

production:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: nameyoursite_databasename
pool: 5
username: username
password: password
socket: /tmp/mysql.sock

NOTE: This is important. I am not sure this is the case for all of the servers, however I found it to be true on the one I was working on. You will need to use the username and password that Site5 sent you for the SiteAdmin. The “additional users” for the database do not work as of the writing of this how-to.

After you have made the changes, save the file and exit.

Next you will need to edit the environment.rb file.

$ nano environment.rb

Remove the # from the line that looks like this

# ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= ‘production’

and make it look like this

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= ‘production’

Again save the changes and exit.

Now change directories back to the root of your site.

$ cd ~

Next, create a symbolic link, or symlink if you prefer, that will map your public directory to the public_html directory. It is important to note when creating the symlink to use a shorter name on the mapped name. I am not sure why and if someone could explain it to me I would greatly appreciate it.

$ ln -s nameyoursite/pubilc/ public_html/nys

Now change the file permissions to make them executable with the system.

$ chmod -R 755 nameyoursite/*

From here you will want to make a back up of your public_html directory and to do that you can run the following command from the ~ directory.

$ mv public_html public_html_back

When that is completed you will now create a new symlink form your application public directory to the a linked public_html directory in the ~ of your site.

$ ln -s ~/nameyoursite/pubilc ~/public_html

Now you will need to add a .htaccess file to the application public directory.

This is what the file will look like.

—- Start .htaccess file – copy below this line —


# General Apache options
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
# If you don't want Rails to look in certain directories,
# use the following rewrite rules so that Apache won't rewrite certain requests
#
# Example:
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/notrails.*
# RewriteRule .* - [L]
# Redirect all requests not available on the filesystem to Rails
# By default the cgi dispatcher is used which is very slow
#
# For better performance replace the dispatcher with the fastcgi one
#
# Example:
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
RewriteEngine On
# If your Rails application is accessed via an Alias directive,
# then you MUST also set the RewriteBase in this htaccess file.
#
# Example:
# Alias /myrailsapp /path/to/myrailsapp/public
# RewriteBase /myrailsapp
RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
# In case Rails experiences terminal errors
# Instead of displaying this message you can supply a file here which will be rendered instead
#
# Example:
# ErrorDocument 500 /500.html
ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2> Rails application failed to start properly”

— End .htaccess file – copy above this line —

Change directories to your application public directory.
$ cd ~/nameyoursite/public
Create a .htaccess file and populate it with the information above.
$ nano .htaccess
Save the file and exit.
Next we want to set the route to our generated controller. So go back to the config directory.
$ cd ~/nameyoursite/config
Open up the routes.rb file with your favorite editor.
$ nano routes.rb
Uncomment the following line
# map.root :controller => “welcome”
and make it look like this
map.root :controller => “site”

and finally remove the index.html file from the application public directory.

$ mv index.html index_old.html

Now all that is left is to go and visit the site to see if it all works.

I thought Javascript may have been the answer and as it turned out, it was. AJAX is my friend. For the second time this week I was able to usefully integrate AJAX into a site I am developing.

Here is the goal:
Post the subscription plan selected to the database while submitting a PayPal subscription button.

Here is one way to do it using AJAX.

First, I didn’t want to show the subscription button. I think it would be too tempting to the user. Hiding the button was accomplished using the CSS style display.


<div style="display:none">
<form id="name_of_your_form" action="action_url" method="post"> -- code for your your PayPal button
</form></div>

This will hide the button code, but still make it available for submission later. Note the id= parameter in the form tag. This will be used later when constructing the link_to_remote link.

The next thing is to write the AJAX enhanced link to make the magic work.

Rails makes this a very easy task. All you need is built into the framework. The link looks like this …


<%= link_to_remote "SUBSCRIBE", { :url => {:action => 'your_process_action', :controller => 'your_controller', :id => the_id_code_to_pass }, :complete => "$('name_of_your_form').submit()"}, :class => "css_class" %>


Note in the :complete parameter, you will need to include the name of the form you wish to submit. Also if you are using multiple forms on the page, be sure to give each form a different id value.

The controller and action will need to contain your processing code and when it is finished the link will submit your form.

Thats it. Enjoy.