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.