Jonathan Spooner

Client: Adio Footwear
Work: Flash ActionScript 3.0, SWFAddress, SEO, Ruby on Rails, REST
Link: www.adiofootwear.com
Description: With SWFAddress at its core this full flash site manages state like a typical html web site. One of the most interesting patterns in this project is the management of multiple tiers of state and loaded assets. The admin was built with Ruby on Rails, deployed with Capistrano and, served by a cluster of 4 Mongrels.

Results: In this graph we can see an immediate 25% decrease in the bounce rate. The orange line shows the bounce rate is know skewed due to an increase of traffic at the site launch. The blue line shows the drop in the user bounce rate. I attribute this improvement to the sites navigation improvements. Visually the navigation is broken up into two consistent visual elements giving the user a familiar tool. Functionally this site improves the user experience by showing state in the address bar and having working forward/back buttons.

This graph compares the average time on site “Orange” improved by 2 minutes and bounce rate decreasing by 25%.

Footwear Page

I found some funny Apple Commercial spoofs yesterday and wanted to share them.  Apart from being funny they actually help show why Rails is such a great tool.

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If you looking to add ImageMagick to your OS X 10.4 machine and your not super familiar with compiling your own binaries use this installer from entropy. Entropy has two installers for OS X 10.2 and 10.3. After a morning of trying to build my own binaries I decided to just give the 10.3 installer a try. So far it works great with no problems.
http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/#imagemagick

Okay lets be honest. 10 hours later and this is not my favorite thing to do. RoR was much easier to get running on the GridServer, which seems to run the apps well.
We purchased the DV for work and it hasn’t been the fastest thing to set up. Here is the article from the MediaTemple knowledgebase for setting up a Ruby on Rails with mongrel. It has you setting up a cluster of mongrels and the process is more difficult than the grid server. I was also unable to get Capistrano working on the DV. I found this recipe but things get hairy quickly.

Yikes! I need to find a good solution that is packaged up and ready to go.

Okay so it’s been several weeks (5 to be exact) since I tried to deploy the bagoflix.com site. Originally I was using Dreamhost but soon found that Ruby on Rails needed a little more juice to. I had a 3 month trial card for MediaTemple and decided to give their Grid Server a try. Vixiom was a big help getting Ruby on Rails installed on the grid server. He also helps you install Capistrano which is a wonderful tool to automatically deploy your rails app from SubVersion. I don’t know how to do this yet but Capistrano enables you to roll back to a previous release if something should go wrong.

I have since installed the whole RoR set up on a MediaTemple DV server. The process wasn’t that bad. You can see how to do it here. I was able to follow their directions and get it to work first try.

In the mean time I decided to launch a small application on Rails just to get the process down before deploying a larger app. There’s all this talk that it won’t scale and crap like that. I want to see for myself. So the app is called linkrook.com and it’s a simple long url redirect program. Check it out!

What do I think of Ruby on Rails now?
I still love it. I’m not a CS guy, just a guy that went to art school and learned ActionScript. OOP is the way to go and PHP drives me crazy, it’s soo messy. RoR helps you do things correctly with version control and clean objects… I could go on and on. Yes it took a bit to get servers set up. Much of that is because MediaTemple’s GridServer has their own mtr commands instead of capistrano.

What Challenge is next?
Getting the ActiveRevver Model to work on Rails 1.2.3. Anyone want to give me any thoughts on how to do so?
My other option is to just use the XML-RPC from Revver. I’m just not exactly sure how to structure each xml request. Revver showes the api but I’m just not quite sure how to use the xml-rpc in ruby. I’ll have to investigate more.

Resources I have found
http://del.icio.us/jspooner/rails
http://del.icio.us/jspooner/rails_deploy

Big thinks to Chris at Assay Deopt for helping me with Capistrano. Check out his developer blog for some good RoR stuff.