Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

For all those people, like me, who would rather listen or watch something than read there is now the perfect way to learn Ruby on Rails. Building Web Apps has a new podcast called Learning Rails by Michael Slater and Chris Haupt. It starts at the very beginning teaching you the most basic things about Rails so is perfect for anyone that has no prior Rails experience.

They have only got to episode 4 so far but I would assume they will keep going and progress to more advanced topics as time goes on, they say there will be a new episode every 2 weeks. The podcast focuses on the concepts behind Ruby on Rails rather than trying to tech coding. I highly recommend the podcast to anyone new to rails.

One of Ruby on Rails strengths is how easy it is to extend with Ruby Gems and plugins, becuase you don’t have to code everything yourself you can save a lot of time. One problem facing Rails codes is knowing what plugins are out there and how to use them. The following is a list of 10 plugins that should make your coding life much easier and save you a fair bit of time.
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Ben Smith has written some Rails 2 upgrade notes which cover the process of upgrading and existing application to Rails 2.0. Included in the article is a rake task for checking depreciation warnings before you upgrade which is very useful.

After upgrading our servers to Rails 2.0 it has come to our attention this has caused problems for some customers rails applications where the application will fail to start. This will happen when your application is not set to use a specific version of rails and will therefor load the most recent version of rails. On servers where customers have been affected we have removed rails 2.0. This is a temporary measure to give customers time to upgrade their applications. We will be reinstalling rails 2.0 on all servers on Friday 14th December. Read on to see how to make sure your rails application will still work after the upgrade.
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Well this one passed us by at Media72 (probably because we are predominantly a mac based company), there is a replacement for Instant rails the in-a-box rails development environment for windows. RubyStack from BitNami is a “Ruby on Rails is a full-stack MVC framework for database-backed web applications that is optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity”, so there you go!
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So Apples new operating system comes with Ruby and Rails pre-installed along with a few standard gems. It does however lack a few things you may need to get your computer running as a development machine.
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Ever wanted to be able to publish your events calendars online using Apples iCal but don’t want to subscribe to Apples .mac service? With Media72 Hosting you can publish calendars from iCal, and any other application that supports publishing via webdav, just like you can using .mac. Read on for instructions…
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