Category Archives: Technical

Simple CMS using Google Spreadsheet API

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Todd Huss

Update 6/14/2007: Dion Almaer has published a nice Javascript helper which makes working with spreadsheets much nicer, I’ve moved my stuff to it and it’s a big improvement over using the Google JSON api directly. Publishing dynamic content on your … Continue reading →

Posted in AJAX, Javascript, Software Engineering | 12 Comments

Open source caching proxy servers

Posted on May 22, 2007 by Todd Huss

Hello lazy web, I’m looking for some advice on caching proxy servers and thought you might have some good pointers! We currently front our site with 3 caching proxy servers to offload static content from the web servers and we … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration, Web | 7 Comments

GreatSchools wins Webby People’s Voice Award

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Todd Huss

I’m thrilled that GreatSchools has won the Webby People’s Voice Award for best Family/Parenting site. We’ve been in the nominations before but I think continued growth and brand awareness through a largely redesigned site helped push us over the top … Continue reading →

Posted in Design, Web | Comments Off

Search engine cloaking, it’s the intent that matters

Posted on April 16, 2007 by Todd Huss

Back at the end of 2005 I wrote a short post titled Cloaking, no need to be ashamed and now in 2007 even more big sites are practicing some form of search engine crawler targeted cloaking. Yet still most SEO’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web | Comments Off

Bay Area Indie Rock Bandega Style

Posted on March 13, 2007 by Todd Huss

My good friends in the east bay have just debuted their new Ruby on Rails based site Bandega :: never miss a show again! If you’re a San Francisco Bay Area resident that loves indie rock and wants to keep … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby on Rails, Web | Comments Off

Search Engine Friendly URLs with Ruby on Rails

Posted on February 4, 2007 by Todd Huss

Update 2/5/07: I’ve since discovered five plugins that address this very problem with slightly different approaches (the latter two store a permalink in the table, good for mutable titles): acts_as_sluggable acts_as_urlnameable acts_as_slugable acts_as_friendly_param permalink_fu Obie’s recent post on search engine … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Search Engine Optimization, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

Ruby on Rails Dreamhost plugin

Posted on February 2, 2007 by Todd Huss

Update 2/11/07: Just to clarify, this plugin won’t keep your Rails site running on Dreamhost if the sum of all your running processes exceeds 200MB (which is when their process monitor kills your processes). Run ps aux and sum the … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration | 15 Comments

Keeping Rails running at Dreamhost Part 2

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Todd Huss

Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin. Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web | 10 Comments

Switching from Edge Rails to 1.2 stable with Piston

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Todd Huss

Update 1/25/07: Francois pointed out that now as of Piston 1.3.0 you can now do this all with the following command: piston switch http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-2-1 vendor/rails For starters, if you’re still using svn:externals to manage your vendor/rails directory it’s time to … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Source Control | 1 Comment

An interview with the authors of JRuby

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Todd Huss

The Java Posse hosted a great podcast interview with the authors of JRuby: Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Additionally you get to hear what Tor Norbye is up to with his work on NetBeans Ruby integration and it looks like … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering | Comments Off