November 22, 2009 @ 02:21 PM by nap · 1 comment
Rdoc.info is now serving up fresh docs using YARD 0.4.0. Doesn’t that new template look nice?
If you’re a Ruby OSS developer and haven’t checked out YARD yet, you really should. It’s easily the best way to generate sexy documentation for your projects and Loren has done a really awesome job with the latest release. The experimental new live docs service (with php.net-style user comments) that he’s testing out is swanky too, and we hope to roll this stuff into Rdoc.info shortly.
In the meantime, you can enjoy the latest YARD features and an updated look and feel. Make sure to add a post-commit hook to your GitHub-hosted project and we’ll automatically rebuild docs whenever you push a new release to your remote. Docs for older versions are maintained as well, and accessible via the usual commit hash url [example].
November 17, 2009 @ 01:12 AM by nap · 0 comments
At NH.rb last night I gave a talk about deploying web applications to the EC2 cloud with Rubber. Rubber is an extension to Capistrano written by Matt Conway that makes provisioning and managing multi-instance EC2 deployments magically delicious [GitHub].
Want to bring up an instant multi-role staging server fully loaded with Apache, Passenger, MySQL, and your Rails app? All gem’d up, migrated, and ready to use? Sure you do. First, sign up for an EC2 account, generate your keypair, and then…
gem install rubber
cd my-rails-project
script/generate vulcanize complete_passenger_mysql
edit config/rubber/rubber.yml
cap rubber:create_staging
It uses a Ubuntu AMI and provisions an EC2 small instance by default. If you added your account credentials and the apt packages and gems you needed to rubber.yml (and provided that there weren’t any unexpected problems), you should now have a fully functional staging server for your web app that you can visit at http://appname.your-domain.com.
Since it’s EC2 you only pay for what you use. What’s more is you can horizontally scale this out with relative ease — breaking out the individual roles to separate instances as needed — and/or add your own custom roles as needed (see the other templates available for examples).
Want to learn more? Peep my slide deck and then check out the Rubber Wiki.
November 15, 2009 @ 12:16 AM by nap · 2 comments
Last weekend I attended the first-ever New Hampshire PodCamp, organized chiefly by my friend Leslie Poston along with a crew of enthusiastic volunteer co-organizers (myself included). I only made it to the second of the two days due to prior obligations but had a good time and enjoyed meeting everyone.
If you’ve never been to a PodCamp (I hadn’t) it’s sort of like a branded BarCamp event that focuses more on how people are using technology — such as podcasting, blogging, social networks, video and music on the web — than on straight-up technical topics. I gave a presentation on Developing Twitter Micro-Apps, which I think was pretty well received.
We talked about why building apps that leverage existing social networks can be advantageous, how you can have fun with it, and how to get going really really quick with easy-to-use Ruby tools like Grackle, Rails templates, TwitterAuth (a Rails engine), Darcy’s BirdGrinder toolkit, and my own simple Retweet / Sinatra recipes. You can check out the slides if you want to learn more.
[ Note: The slides were made with slidedown. Although it’s still a little rough in places, it’s quickly becoming my favorite tool for creating slideshows in plain text. ]
That’s me looking pretty intense, live-coding some Twittery shit during the talk. Because, I’m hardcore like that. Unfortunately I didn’t have anyone record the live-coding portions of the presentation, in which we built a conversation aggregator as well as a simple faux-popularity reporting service. Ah well. Other attendees gave talks on topics as various as building interactive and community television outlets on the web, Facebook app development, film promotion, digital photography, and creating Firefox add-ons.
The event itself was held at the New Hampton school in the middle of nowhere New Hampton, NH, which is about an hour north of Manchester. It was quite isolated but the campus was beautiful and the solitude gave people a chance to get away from everything and kept everyone in one spot, resulting in less distractions and more focus on community. Although I really enjoy urban city-center events a lot — especially when they intelligently integrate other elements of the host city into after-hours events — there’s something really nice about isolated rural events (the first New England Railscamp was another example of this)
As someone who has never been very involved in organizing non-virtual conferences / events before, it was also interesting to observe and assist with the process of venue selection, sponsor lineup, and so on. In short: it’s a lot of work, but the payoff is great if it’s done well. Congrats and a big thank-you to Leslie (and all the other co-organizers) for putting this all together. There’s already talk of scheduling the next one for June 2010.
