Ruby on Rails
The 4th of July isn’t really a resolution-type holiday, but I’ve been neglecting my desire to play around with ruby on the side. So, now that the food coma has worn off (mmm, barbeque), I’m going to try to spend at least one night a week playing with Flex/Ruby just for fun.
I ended up going with DreamHost for my ruby host… the whole pyramid referral thing kinda creeps me out, but for as cheap as they are (and for only about $25 for the first year)… I really didn’t think I could do better. They use fastCGI and seem pretty slow and aren’t as cool as the other host I considered (SpeedyRails), but they have the added benefit of hosting infinite domains. I’ve been really happy with Yahoo’s small business hosting (I’ve had it for around 3 years now — it’s pricey, but stupid-simple), and my biggest complaint has been the inability to host multiple domains (I typically use around 1% of my monthly bandwidth). So, in other words, because performance isn’t a big issue and I’ve got a couple of other domains I want to play with… DreamHost it is.
I got my rails app, database, and subversion repositories set up without too much trouble. I haven’t decided if I want to mess with Capistrano yet (might be better to just work on learning rails first). I got the skeleton app up and running with no problems, so now it’s just a matter of sorting through tutorials until I find one I like. Dreamhost seems to only support the production environment, so I’m also going to set up InstantRails on my PC. I already started the “official” ruby on rails tutorial over on the rubyonrails.org wiki, but it seems pretty general. The ONLamp tutorial will probably be stop #2.
I was also pretty pumped to find this tutorial (although a bit old), which basically details exactly the sort of thing I want to build–well at least the data side. Maybe that’s why there are so many of these things out there. I don’t really care about the data, though, I just see the data as an excuse to play with rails and flex.
Okay… enough blogging–now back to work.
