New host, new look and feel, new functionality
New look and feel
Just in time for the new year and a new look site. I've refreshed the design, keeping to the same colours but changing the layout slightly. The main idea behind being to allow for more space for articles, to make the home page more of an about page and to make better use of my portfolio thumbnails.
New functionality
You can now add comments to my articles. I've implemented my own custom spam protection method so it will be interesting to see how it copes.
The search also now uses sessions so that it will keep the results visible as you navigate to different pages.
New host
Bluehost were letting me down, their support for Rails is poor and the reliability not good enough. hostingrails.com allow me to use Mongrel servers so the site will run faster and they also support SVN and capistrano for deployment. As their name suggests they are geared up for Rails developers and it just makes life that much easier.
With Bluehost my site was down and had many fast cgi errors in the crash log. I informed the support team and after a few days I was told that the reason my site was not working was because I had renamed my index.html file in the public folder. Anyone with the smallest amount of Rails knowledge would know that removing/renaming your index.html file is one of the first things you do when you start programming your app.
About
Paul is a web developer for Kyanmedia web agency. He's lucky enough to write in Ruby on Rails full-time and uses this site to post snippets of code.
Contact
my name at gmail.com
More snippets
Take a look in the archive
Need a website?
Contact my employer. Make sure to check out our portfolio of work.
Hosting
I recommend hostingrails.com
5 comments made
You’re website is very snappy. Which hosting package are you using at hostingrails.com?
I went for the business plan in the end. But that’s mostly because of the disk space and static memory allocation.
It’s the use of Mongrel web server that really effects the speed and fortunately you can use it on any of their packages.
Now that a few weeks have passed, are you still pleased with HostingRails? I’m considering moving my business to them as well.
In short, i’m really pleased.
The support is great, I get replies to all my queries very quickly. The staff are knowledgeable and very helpful.
I have capistrano and SVN setup which has made things really easy for me.
Hostingrails don’t try to cram too many sites onto each server and because you reserve your RAM it makes for a very stable environment.
Just a quick update to say that a year on and the hosting has been superb, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend hostingrails at all.
Got something to say?