I really do hate using my blog to voice negative opinions about products and services, but in certain situations I feel comfortable doing so. I think it’s fair to educate consumers of lessons learned and pitfalls when choosing a particular product. In this case it’s GoDaddy’s Rails hosting. Plain and simple: IT [...]

Today I was thinking about how to manage file uploads (mainly images) and not having to maintain them in the database. I wanted to take the approach of storing a reference to the image in the database (/public/photos/my_image.jpg) and have the image live on the file system.
Initially my Photo model extended ActiveRecord and I [...]

Since I’ve been playing around with RMagick on OS X I decided to go through the motions of installing it on my Linux server.  This is necessary since my Rails apps are deployed to this server.  I found a good set of installation instructions on this page that I followed step by step.
Everything compiled and [...]

There’s always seems to be some daunting hurdle when dealing with relatively new technologies. I stumbled across the hurdle this evening and it’s one that will either “make you or break you”. For me it was getting RMagick working with Rails on OS X. Luckily I stumbled across this INCREDIBLE article that [...]

I’ve decided to post my fortunes for the world to read. Jamie and I went to Pei Wei yesterday and I always get a fortune cookie to end on a good note. I’m not superstitious, but I do feel like fortune cookies are God’s way of talking to me in a dumbed-down message. [...]

I’ve done quite a few posts around getting my Rails app configured on GoDaddy’s servers. Let me first say that this is cumbersome, GoDaddy’s support is not the greatest when it comes to Rails, and the application is unbearably slow. I thought this was the case for only the server I was on, [...]

I was recently faced with a common problem that I wanted to share.  During development there are times you need to specifiy a global or constant variable that will be shared throughout the entire application.  In ColdFusion you would normally place something like this in Application.cfm.  In Rails I was uncertain how exactly to approach [...]

Out of all the Firefox extensions I’ve used my recent favorite is FireBug. If you do any sort of web development then you NEED to get this extension. It consists mainly of a console, debugger, and DOM inspector. These are much needed tools for web application development. My favorite feature of [...]

I was recently doing Rails development on my Mac without an internet connection.  Yes it can still be done, but there are certain things that are easily overlooked.  One of these was testing the ability of the application to send emails upon user registration.  Since I had no connection I was wondering if there was [...]

On a recent mission trip to help with Hope For Honduras a buddy of mine told me to try the papusas. When we were out in Tegucigalpa one of our hosts took us to a place that served them and I was extremely impressed. I had no clue how to spell papusa until this evening [...]