I’ve been hosting my flagship SaaS app on Heroku since 2008. Overall it’s been a stable, if a bit overpriced, platform. Over the past year, however, I’ve been experiencing mysterious performance problems. The app runs fine for several weeks. Then suddenly I begin receiving exception reports about certain methods not … Continue reading
It was January, 2005. Google had launched its invitation-only beta release of Gmail just a few months ago. The initial storage capacity of 1 GB was dramatic, with its closest competitors offering an anemic 15 or 20 MB. My beta invite had finally arrived and I was in the process … Continue reading
Muut (formerly Moot) is a lightweight, customizable commenting system. Octopress is a static blogging framework built on Jekyll. Mix the two and you have a delicious recipe enabling visitors to comment on static blog posts without having to resort to a database. My Octopress plugin makes this integration super easy. … Continue reading
A recent project required the latest YouTube videos from a specific user to be listed inside a Radiant page. There wasn’t an existing extension that did this so I built my own. youtube_tags is based on the excellent twitter_tags extension. It enables inclusion of YouTube videos within Radiant pages using … Continue reading
I built the original Spreedly extension for Radiant a couple of years ago. It’s a nice little package that makes it really easy to integrate Spreedly’s subscription payment system with your Radiant site. You can choose which pages to require a subscription to view, manage subscribers from the admin backend, … Continue reading
I’ll be presenting on A/B testing at tonight’s raleigh.rb meetup. As developers, we use tools like RSpec and Cucumber to verify that our application is functional, but how can we verify that the layout of our home page is user-friendly? How can we determine the ideal size for our signup … Continue reading
Git is a wonderful SCM with some very powerful features. But as a programmer, it’s very easy to aquire a rudimentary working knowledge of Git and never learn anything more. For example, how would we fix our repository if we committed the wrong piece of code? What if our commit … Continue reading
Lindo is great for verifying your Rails tests by opening the HTTP response body in a browser for inspection. It works with most popular testing frameworks including Test::Unit and RSpec. But what about Cucumber? It’s actually pretty easy to build a custom Cucumber step that triggers Lindo from your cukes. … Continue reading
I recently upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.9.1 and I’m very pleased with the results. The upgrade itself was very straightforward. It was just a matter of replacing the correct files in my project. I have my project checked into GitHub so I was able to immediately see what had … Continue reading
If you’ve ever performed a fresh install of Ubuntu, you’ve probably noticed that the delete/backspace key doesn’t work correctly in nano. This is frustrating, but easy enough to fix. This problem also occurs quite frequently for me when logging into a remote server. For example, a default Slicehost instance usually … Continue reading