RoR’s IRC community
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
As I mentioned in a previous post, I just aquired a new host that has Ruby on Rails support so I’ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days. It’s definitly been an unbelievable experience, both in a good and bad way.
The good is that the possibilties are literely endless, there is so much you can do with RoR..and the list is just growing. RoR was only released in the wild just under four years ago and the online community has been expanding like crazy.
For example there are currently 318 users in #rubyonrails and only 23 in #windows95, which says a lot considering Windows has been around for more than five times the number of years…
…ok that might be a bad example, but hey, 318 users isn’t too shabby.
RoR provides an easy to use method to get the backbone framework of a web application up and going in next to no time, and you can find examples of this here. As DHH says while he’s creating a weblog, “Whoops! Look at all the things I’m NOT doing!”.
The bad for me is of course the fact that I do need to switch my way of thinking. Before dipping into RoR, I would look at http://example.net/foo/bar/ as if I was looking at the contents of the bar/ folder inside foo/…well that all changed. RoR instead says that im actually looking at the action “bar” for the controller “foo”.
Or to put it in simple terms, looking at http://example.net/pages might give me a list of all pages, and http://example.net/pages/new, would preform the “new” action on the “pages” controller. Which would…you guessed it, create a new page.
Might sound complicated but it gets easier as you work through it.
Which brings me to the reason I had the urge to write this post. I’ve been lurking on #rubyonrails and just had to comment on how helpful the other users are. Anytime I have a question, I throw it to the other 317 people in the room, and under a minute or two someone has been able to guide me. Which is outstanding considering no one is paid, infact spending time on the server probably takes them away from something more productive.
Although something one of my highschool teachers brought up comes to mind, a lot of the guys* on the channel have their ego’s to maintain, and thus they will do everything possible to help people like me who are just venturing into their world.
*Contrary to XKCD, there are indeed no girls on the internet.
HostMonster, the new host on my block
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Web
Well I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks, and this blog has basically gone dead. Although I still get a fair share of googlers looking up Mojo, or comparing the Sequoia with the Navigator.
So onto current news of the…month now I guess; On browsing around the web I stumbled across HostMonster, a webhost that had some intersting features to offer.
Currently I am with 1&1 hosting, and I have been extremely happy with their service, the price was an unbelievable $5/month for two included domains, 120GB storage, 1.2TB monthly bandwidth (Not a typo), and the usual 2GB IMAP email inboxes, PHP, Perl etc.
For $6/month (Promotional price, now it’s $7), HostMonster gives me unlimited storage and bandwith (Which itself pays for the $1 premium), one included domain, SSH access, & Ruby on Rails. RoR is something I’ve been wanting to sit and play with for quite some time now so it was love at first site.
In addition one of my only caveats with 1and1 was that they forced your ftp account name to contain your Customer ID, a long random string of numbers. Small annoyance, but terribly irratating when you dont have it saved in the software. Needless to say, this was non-existant with HostMonster.
That’s enough for praise.
The first incident I had with HM was that immediatly after confirming my payment, HM sent my user/pass in clear text in a URL. Which meant that not only did my password get saved in my computers history, it also got sent over the network for anyone to sniff.
In addition it seems that one of the two ways that HM verifies your identification when you call in, is to ask you for your password, it seems that anyone on their tech support has access to your password. Which may not be the end of the world, as they also have full access to your account, but it is the priciple of the thing. In this day and age, it should be their policy to never ask for a customers password. 1&1 asks for the customer ID number, and/or phonenumber, name.
Also for some unknown reason, Editplus isnt able to edit any files on the ftp server, due to either permission issues, or cryptic error messages saying that the “File doesn’t exist”.
I plan on sticking it out a little while longer, till I can get shell access (a procedure that has to be verified with a Photo ID) and play around with RoR.
Tags: RoR, security, server, Technology
