I’m pleased to say that after 3 hours I had the install done and all of my software installed and working including Jetbrains IDEA, Netbeans, Skype, VirtualBox, Flash plugin, Java plugin, Web Developer Toolbar, and Firebug. Apparently things have gotten a little better for 64 bit Linux over the past year and a half! However, I’m still running into odd issues every now and again related to both Sun’s 64 bit Java (IDE and Jetty occasionally hangs) and the the Open JDK browser plugin which is still buggy. Hopefully future updates will help address these issues. Anyhow, I thought I’d throw out the links I used to get everything working:

Fonts
Howto: Install Mac Fonts on Ubuntu
Make Firefox in Ubuntu look much better

Skype
Add the Medibuntu repository
sudo apt-get install skype-static

Flash plugin
Install Flash 10 Under Ubuntu Linux 64 bit Edition

Java plugin
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre icedtea-gcjwebplugin

October 4th, 2007 was my last day as the VP of Technology at GreatSchools when I handed the reigns over to Chris Pickslay so that Susan, Sequoia, and I could take off on our sailboat to Mexico for 6-12 months. It was a great 4 years leading the tech team at GreatSchools and I was sad to leave such a terrific job and group of people but both Susan and I were really feeling the itch for some adventure under sail. Our plan was to explore the Baja peninsula, mainland Mexico, and of course the lovely Sea of Cortez.

8 months have passed and we had some great fun and adventures which you can read about on our sailing blog if you’re interested, it all starts here when we moved aboard the boat. However, with hurricane season approaching we decided to put the boat into dry storage in San Carlos Mexico for the summer and return home for 6 months to work and catch up with friends and family.

Starting June 10th I’ll be back at GreatSchools 3 days a week as a contractor until we go back to Mexico and this time I’ll be working for Chris instead of the other way around!

Having worked with a lot of front-end developers I can confirm that almost all of them would benefit from this book since most still

• use floats for layout as opposed to position absolute (which is easily misunderstood because it’s positioning relative to the containing block)
• few seem to regularly run their XHTML through a validator (a pet peeve of mine)
• and even fewer seem to know to employ the concept of a CSS reset

It’s hard to convey all of the great stuff in this book but I can almost guarantee that if you work with CSS this book will open your eyes to a better way of doing things.

Publishing dynamic content on your website in a format that you can style with CSS has gotten a whole lot easier with Google’s simple JSON based Javascript API’s. The two I’ve found myself playing with lately are the Google Ajax Feed API for publishing RSS and Atom feeds and the Google Spreadsheet API
for publishing little snippets of text that should be easily editable.

Say you want a simple headline on your homepage that you can change daily. Here’s how you’d do it with the Google Spreadsheet API:

1. Create a spreadsheet making the first row the column headers (important because you’ll refer to the cell by the column header):

2. Go to the publish tab and publish the spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pouqRkV5D_eZT_VdOKu7CQA. Note in this example the key is pouqRkV5D_eZT_VdOKu7CQA

3. Use a simple container div and some javascript to display the field:

<div id="headline"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
function displayContent(json) { document.getElementById('headline').innerHTML = json.feed.entry[0].gsx$html.$t; }
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/pouqRkV5D_eZT_VdOKu7CQA/od6/public/values?alt=json-in-script&callback=displayContent">
</script>

Note: the spreadsheet key in the URL that needs to be replaced. Also, entry[0] refers to row 2 in the spreadsheet (because row 1 contains the column headers and is not considered an entry):

4. The text appears dynamically on the page:

Palm releases Linux based Foleo

5. When it’s time to update, make your changes to the spreadsheet, go the publish tab, and republish it and the changes will appear on your site!

The only real downside I can think of with this simple approach is that it’s not SEO friendly so if you want all search engine crawlers to follow those links you publish, you’re better off with a non-javascript solution. The Spreadsheets API google group is a good resource and Pamela Fox has some examples to look at.

We currently front our site with 3 caching proxy servers to offload static content from the web servers and we haven’t found the right solution yet. We’ve tried a number of solutions including Oops and Apache with mod_cache (which we’re currently running) but they are either missing a critical feature, have buggy caching behavior, or crash under heavy load. The main features I’m looking for are:

1. Caches static content and pages and respects the expires header
2. Can gzip content on the fly (this saves us a bundle in bandwidth costs)
3. Can easily clear the cache when we move a new release live

I’d prefer an open-source product but if we end up needing to go with a commercial solution as a last resort I’m open to that as well, thanks for your suggestions or help!

State landing page (now called Research and Compare)

The school profile overview page:

The city page:

1. Amazon.com: set your user agent to Googlebot and you won’t see a search box anymore. Crawlers don’t do forms and Amazon saves some bandwidth.
2. Yahoo.com: almost every link is rewritten to go through a click tracking redirect but not so for crawlers. Yahoo doesn’t count the clicks from crawlers which is good for their metrics and the sites they link to get non redirected inbound links.
3. Salon.com: crawlers get the real home page without having to see a full page ad first. I think I’ll start surfing Salon as Googlebot from now on
4. CNN.com, MSN, Myspace, and EBay.com: crawlers don’t get served ad serving code saving bandwidth.

In all of the above cases these sites are serving adjusted content targeted to search engine user agents and generally it’s for the good. In the end the decision to cloak or not all comes down to good judgment and intent. If it helps crawlers avoid duplicate content or saves bandwidth then we shouldn’t be so quick to write off cloaking just because it has such a negative connotation. That said, if there’s any doubt in your mind be very weary and seek expert opinions because getting delisted for bad cloaking can result in a lot of lost revenue!

• acts_as_sluggable
• acts_as_urlnameable
• acts_as_slugable
• acts_as_friendly_param
• permalink_fu

Obie’s recent post on search engine friendly URL’s in Ruby on Rails 1.2 and greater couldn’t have been more timely. I was about to tackle search engine friendly URL’s on my little local san francisco bay area boating classifieds site and after reading his blog post, 15 minutes later it was done. Here’s the old URL structure:

http://gearandboats.com/forums/1/topics/51

and the new (longer for humans but much better for SEO):

http://gearandboats.com/forums/1-boats/topics/51-fantasia-35-mark-ii-cruiser

The most important thing is that the URL’s are backwards compatible because everything after the ID is ignored which is key for pages that are already in the search engines!

To achieve this I combined Obie’s approach with Ricks Permalink_fu plugin (for converting text to permalinks):

script/plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/permalink_fu

Then in my topic.rb model object I do:

def to_param
  "#{id}-#{PermalinkFu.escape(title)}"
end

and I double checked to make sure that the views always call link_to passing the model object rather than the ID (so that the to_param method has access to the id and the title). Fortunately beast.caboo.se (which is what I based my site on) make heavy use of named routes:

<%= link_to h(topic.title), topic_path(@forum, topic) %>

After that I was pretty much done but I had some really long URL’s so I truncated the title to the first 5 words by changing PermalinkFu.escape(title)
to PermalinkFu.escape(title.split[0..4].join(’ ‘)).

Per Thomas Aylott’s suggestion on my previous post Keeping Rails Running at Dreamhost Part 2 I’ve decided to release my Dreamhost signal handling code as a Rails plugin. I’m using it on a Rails 1.2.1 site and a Rails 1.1.6 site.

Here’s the deal:

1. Get your Rails site running on Dreamhost (the wiki should you get you there).
2. Once you’ve got it working, if you experience occasional 500 errors try my signal handling plugin. I still had 500 errors with the frao_handler approach described on the wiki, but if my plugin doesn’t work for you it can’t hurt to try it.

Here’s how to install the plugin:

script/plugin install http://gabrito.com/svn/plugins/dreamhost

With the plugin installed, the dispatch.fcgi will defer exiting when Dreamhost sends your dispatch.fcgi process a TERM signal if it is in the middle of handling a request, otherwise it behaves normally. This has reduced the 500 error rate on my two rails based sites to zero, your mileage may vary though. If you still have problems please don’t comment here and say it doesn’t work, instead figure out the problem and email a patch to thuss [at] gabrito [o] com!

The subversion repo for the plugin is at http://gabrito.com/svn/plugins/dreamhost. If you have other Dreamhost related fixes that make sense for this plugin send them to me and I’ll incorporate them.