Rudi on Rails

The common way to deploy a Rails application is to create a subdomain and point it to the folder where your application lies. This works well for those subdomains as well as addon-domains, but what about your main domain? If you are someone like me who bought the hosting solution together with the domain, then you might wonder how you get your Rails app accessed under this domain.

This site is hosted on Bluehost and there is no facility to point the domain to a specific folder via a control panel. Therefore, there general sequence is as the following:

1. Create your Rails structure with rails myrailsapp
2. Create a new subdomain myrailsapp in your control panel
3. Go to public_html and delete the myrailsapp folder
4. Make a symbolic link to the folder of the rails app with ln -s ~/path/to/myrailsapp/public myrailsapp
5. Change your .htaccess in the public folder to get the redirect to the symbolic link

On the verge of getting this web site running I noticed, that all the links are still redirected to http://domain.com/myrailsapp/ instead of remaining at http://domain.com/. All would work, but that’s not what I wanted.

Therefore, I reached for a rather drastic approach: link the public_html/ directly to the myrailsapp/public/ folder:

1. Create your Rails structure with rails myrailsapp
2. Rename your current public_html folder with mv public_html public_html-backup
3. Make a symbolic link to the folder of the rails app with ln -s ~/path/to/myrailsapp/public public_html

This all works pretty well for me. The only thing to mind is copying the subdomains/folders/files that are now in the old public_html-backup over to the new one. Since the new public_html is only a symbolic link to the rails app, it was actually copied into myrailsapp/public/. However, everything works as before.

Now, if you smite your forehead and say: “there’s a much better way”, then please let me know!

Lo and behold everyone! I finally made it. Having that domain name for about a year already, I never got around to finish the web site I originally started – until now! In short: It’s a celebration, bitches!

Triple W

Who am I? Hi, my name is Rudi. I work as web developer and general dogsbody in a nice little web design company in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom. Originally coming all the way from Germany I don’t really remember how I ended up here – perhaps I will when writing the about section. That is where you will find much more information about me, what I am currently involved with, and projects I have done in the past. As this site is still fresh and clean (that’s the part where you have to lean back, take a deep breath, and get that new smell), I did not want to overload it with all that stuff, yet. All the empty space will certainly be filled soon.

What’s all this about? This web site is going to be used as general base for everything that I think is worth sharing with the world. You may like it, or you may not – in either case I’d like to hear your thoughts. Mainly though, I plan on using this site to display and extend my portfolio. I have fair bit of online work under my belt already since I started as professional in October 2006, and a couple of really cool applications coming up that are mainly developed with Ruby on Rails. So… stay tuned for more!

Why Rudionrails? For a little longer than a year now, I am using Ruby on Rails – a framework to develop database-driven web applications (Yea thats right: this is the geek part! You normal people out there may skip this paragraph and continue reading further down). All started off when working on my Master’s in 2006. I knew about it before already, but never had an in-depth look at it. I sometimes want to smack myself for not using it before, because it has made me a better developer in many ways. Still, it is not the right post to let my thoughts wander about Rails, I do that enough already at work (wink to my colleagues). So why Rudionrails? Well, Ruby on Rails – Rudi on Rails… get it? And seriously… why not?!

First deed of the day

Actually, I just wanted to share the designs I have made before starting with that site. There were a couple of different layouts and colour schemes, but only two made it to the final run. Kudos to Adobe’s Kuler and the people publishing all those awesome colour schemes there. For design imbeciles like me thats the last resort! The one I am using at the moment is based on the pretty high rated Granny Smith Apple colour set made by Donald Agarrat. Go check it out… you can spend hours browsing through their database. The second finalist is based on an old design I made or this site almost a year ago already. The page layout was very different though. I incorporated it into the layout for this site.

Enough about that! Here they are:

I hope you like them. I actually asked a couple of people before I decided which to use. They all favoured the green one, me included. And, ohh yea, I use mephisto to power my blog. In my opinion, thats an awesome and very scalable CMS for blogging – of course developed in Ruby on Rails.

So, what now? Well, that is pretty much it for today, but I’d love to hear what you think about my site. Happy posting!