Slash Dot Dash » Blog

Ruby and Rails Magazines available to Buy or download

Ben — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:03:19 +0000

The thriving Ruby and Rails communities have produced a couple of magazines that you can buy (to show your support) or download PDF versions absolutely free.

Rails Magazine – Issue 1 (1st March 2009)

The Beginning; 36 pages of Rails goodness.

Receiving E-Mail With Rails by Jason Seifer
Delegation in Ruby by Khaled al Habache
Subscription billing with Saasy by Alex MacCaw
Making the Switch From RSpec to Shoulda by Dan Pickett
Playing Hooky a.k.a. web hooks by John Nunemaker
Adhearsion by Jason Goecke & Jay Phillips
Rails Performance Analysis by Terry Heath
Getting Started with JRuby and JRuby on Rails by Joshua Moore
Extending Rails Through Plugins by John Yerhot

Buy Now or Download for free.

The Rubyist – Issue 1 (August 2008)

Hampton Catlin, Rein Henrichs, and friends in the first issue of the Rubyist. INSIDE: An interview with Rein Henrichs on Ruby best practices, an interview with Hampton Catlin about Jabl, columns from Giles Bowkett and Rein Henrichs, a Ruby quiz-esque challenge (you can win an iPhone! Yes, you!), building DataMapper adapters, Ben Scofield shares some techniques for auditing your code, using RubyOSA with Evan Light, Yehuda Katz waxes rhapsodic on performance measures in Merb, and learning about building gems with BDD from Jamie van Dyke!

Buy Now or Download for free.

The Rubyist – Issue 2 (February 2009)

Regional conferences with Pat Eyler
Talking about the Rails merge with Zach Inglis, and interviews with DHH, Ted Han, and more
Scott Chacon drops some Git knowledge
Yehuda Katz discusses his journey from Rails to Merb to Rails
Martin Rehfeld shares his solution from last issue’s homework
Obie Fernandez talks about client managment
Aaron Quint spends some time with Sinatra
Evan David Light talks BDD
Ben Scofield talks about testing iPhone applications using Ruby
Eric Hodel talks about the next generation of RubyGems
Dennis Theisen teaches how to use ActiveMerchant
Carlo Pecchia shows off JRuby

Buy Now or Download for free.

Migrating this blog from Typo to WordPress

Ben — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:50:39 +0000

After recently installing Phusion Passenger under Apache 2 to host my Rails apps I wanted to give Ruby Enterprise Edition a go. However as I was running an old version of Typo (version 4.x) which didn’t seem to like running under REE I decided to migrate to WordPress; upgrading Typo would be just as much work.

There’s already a Ruby upgrade script to create a WordPress compatible WXR file for importing which includes all posts, comments and categories from Typo. I needed to modify the Ruby script slightly to get working with the version of Typo I had installed.

Exporting Typo blog content to WordPress WXR

The Ruby script needs to be placed into the script directory of the Typo application root and then run under the production Rails environment:

RAILS_ENV=production ruby script/wp_export.rb > blog.wxr

Installing WordPress

Simply follow the basic WordPress install guide after downloading the latest software (version 2.7 at the time of writing). The pre-requisites for WordPress are PHP 4.3 or newer and MySQL 4.0 or greater.

Import existing content

Once WordPress is installed, log in to the admin section and select Import from the Tools menu. Choose the WordPress option from the list (Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags from a WordPress export file). You’ll need to select the blog.wxr file created by the Ruby script and then click Upload file and import. That should recreate your existing Typo blog content (and comments), you may be asked to map the Typo user(s) to WordPress accounts.

With the content installed, the final change required is to setup the Permalink Settings from Settings > Permalinks. Select the Day and name option (giving URLs such as http://www.slashdotdash.net/2009/01/02/sample-post/). You may need to manually edit or create the .htaccess file to get the rewrite rules working.

# .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

With this working you should find that the standard Typo permalinks (such as http://www.slashdotdash.net/articles/2009/01/02/sample-post/) will now redirect to the corresponding WordPress blog entry, ensuring no broken links when switching from Typo to WordPress.

Known Issues

You’ll probably have a problem with RSS feed readers creating duplicates of the last 10 posts (depending upon your “Syndication feeds show the most recent” settings) since the post URLs and GUIDs will have changed.

Quick Update – Blog feed has MOVED!

Ben — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:58:56 +0000

Just a short note to mention that I have moved the RSS feed for this blog to FeedBurner.

The original feeds should redirect to Feedburner and hopefully you won’t notice any difference. Drop me a comment if you experience any problems.

Typo 4 Upgrade

Ben — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 23:13:32 +0000

Finally got round to upgrading to Typo 4 (you may have noticed the theme changed again).

Initially I had a problem with the new Typo gem (installing on a Debian server). This was caused by the sqlite3 gem dependency and was resolved quite simply.

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Requires the sqlite3 development headers, which were an apt-get command away.

apt-get install sqlite3 sqlite3-ruby libsqlite3-dev
gem install sqlite3-ruby

Install Typo 4

gem install typo
mysqldump  -uusername -p > backup.sql
mv /old/blog/location /old/blog_bak
typo install /your/path

Copy over database.yml to new location (and also .htaccess file), then update the database.

rake migrate

Restart the webserver and voila.

Another weblog

Ben — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 19:15:00 +0000

All men are bloggers.

Ben is a man.

Therefore, ben is a blogger¹.

Background

This blog will primarily focus on technology and coding, so before I jump in and start hammering away you might want to find out a little bit more about my background.

I am a recent convert to both Ruby on Rails and Apple Mac OS X. Before then I have been both an Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux user (and still have a Debian Linux server). I also get to dabble with Microsoft Windows which still remains a large part of my life through work commitments development .NET applications.

¹ Wikipedia