I’ve been MIA for a while caught up in a project, but wanted to do a brief post.  If you’re considering developing and deploying a Rails app in the near future then you need to consider using Rails Playground for your hosting.  These guys have given me the best experience I’ve ever encountered when dealing with a web hosting company.  Even better, they completely understand Rails inside and out.  There have been several occasions where I’ve had a configuration issue and they’ve fixed it within minutes.  You’ll most likely have the pleasure of working with Joe Clarke, their tech support extraordinaire.  If you listen to my advice only once then go with Rails Playground.  This is THE hosting company for Rails developers.

I’m a Fireworks kinda guy since Photoshop tends to be overkill for most of the web stuff I do.  While I’m a huge fan of layers when doing any sort of graphic design I love using Fireworks frames to organize design elements (see image below).  This is not the intended use of frames, but I’ve found them exceptionally handy when doing difference screen concepts.  The other day I found a great shortcut that enables you to easily switch between frames.  You can use CTRL-Page Up (previous frame) and CTRL-Page Down (next frame) to move through frames.  On the Mac this is achieved with Command-Page Up and Command-Page Down. Here’s a great shortcut reference from Adobe.

I recently ran into a problem with single quotes in my application. I’m allowing users to post comments that could consist of single quotes. This is problematic if you’re doing any sort of JavaScript manipulation or presentation of the string. After digging around I stumbled across the great escape_javascript helper. The code under the hood is short and sweet, but it’s easier to remember escape_javascript than:

str.gsub(/\r\n|\n|\r/, “\\n”).gsub(/["']/) { |m| “\\#{m}” }

Give it a run if you’re doing any sort of JavaScript work with your strings.

I deal with this at least twice a week at the office.  It would be a different story if people were driving Bugatti Veyrons and double-parking to protect their $1.2 million investment.  But this is either sheer laziness or lack of driving skills.  Either way, please show a little regard for others and learn how to park.

This took me way too long to figure out, but I finally got it.  It’s not the most desirable solution and I’m currently looking into alternate approaches.  Bluehost has a great howto for running Rails with a subdomain ie (app.domain.com), but I wasn’t able to find anything about running Rails in the web root.  With Bluehost your document root actually lives in the public_html folder.  Now the trick is to remove or rename public_html and then create a symbolic link:

ln -s /home/domain/railsapp/public public_html

This should do the trick and all incoming requests will be routed to the necessary controllers.  I was fairly excited to get this working since I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time trying to get Rails running in my web root.