Well, that only took 29 days, but my blog has returned to the living!

Currently, my clientele consists of a very small site that someone paid me for, and a handful of personal projects.

I’m not really making enough money at this point to justify having 2 servers, but suddenly a backup seems quite nice. My web uptime the last 3 weeks has been something like 0.00001%, which has totally destroyed any sense of productivity.

I set up my entire workflow based on having access to my server that is as of now mostly useless. For example, my subversion repository is inaccessible, which throws a huge wrench in my source-coding. All of my current projects (including the one that might make me any money) demos are all down.

full time job + life crap = not getting the chance to take care of this stuff quickly

which could wind up costing me the one project with potential income

which means I can’t afford a backup server…

My main web server is still hosed. I managed to completely screw up the open directory config, and have 0 remote access to anything. And the web service is down.

Plan A* is to have my buddy attempt to re-create the open directory structure.

Plan *B is to have the server shipped to me so I can reinstall the OS

Plan C*, which is completely independent of the other two plans, is to kick myself in the ass for not taking the time to more throughly troubleshoot when I was *STANDING NEXT TO THE SERVER last week. Can I was only in town for 3 days be my excuse? I hope so, because that’s all I’ve got.

My simple little WeeWar maps app is live!

Check it out: WeeMap

DNS might still be updating, so check back if it’s down for you.

Man, I am getting warmed up to Leopard Server quick. Although I don’t think I’ll be replacing Simplelog just yet, the ability to use 3rd party apps to interface with the built-in blog system makes it that much more attractive.

To access your blog, use an applicatioin that works with the Metaweblog API. Use the following information to configure the editor:

RPC Access Point: http://serverDNSname/RPC2
Username or Blog ID: Your user name or the name of your group

I’ve managed to get SVN & Warehouse somewhat up and running on my server, and now that he’s online, I’m trying to get everything 100%.

Right now, I’m testing the following post-commit hook in one of my repositories to see if it works. The directory names have been changed to match my server, but otherwise this is just the basic suggestion from the Warehouse FAQ.

#!/bin/sh
cd /Library/WebServer/Rails/warehouse-1.1.6
/usr/bin/rake warehouse:post_commit \
     RAILS_ENV=production \
     REPO_PATH=$1 \
     REVISION=$2

As expected, I received a ‘you’re not important, so we’re not updating our system gems’ message from GoDaddy.

While this sucks, I’ve resorted to plan ‘b’ ship my mini, Hobbes, out to be colocated a little earlier than planned.

I don’t plan on renewing my hosting contract with GoDaddy, and I haven’t since I bought the mini, so I’m not really that upset by their response. The biggest disappointment is not being able to publish my lil weemap app.

WeeWar custom map makers and players will just have to wait a little longer. Hobbes should be online in a week or so.

Ok. I’ve re-uploaded the gems. Still nothing. I switched over to development mode and CGI instead of fastCGI and finally started seeing error messages. Turns out GoDaddy is running old system GEMs, and needs to update.

The biggest problem here is that I’ve frozen my rails version to my app’s vendor/ directory. There should be nothing else (core Rails wise) that is needed to run my app. I’m not using any non-standard gems, and my plugins are all in the app itself.

For more details on the exact issue I’ve run up against, see this ticket

This ticket has been listed as ‘invalid’. Such a shame that the core developers disregard those of us who eek out a meager existence on shared servers.

Mostly for my benefit later, but maybe helpful to you other rails newbs: I always seem to not be able to find this quickly when I want to freeze mah gems. It isn’t that hard, I’m just that absent minded.

rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-2

rake rails:update:configs

script/about

One step closer to getting my server up to production!

After several mis-steps, I’ve finally configured subversion in leopard server, and have mostly gotten Warehouse running.

I can’t wait to migrate all of my sites over to the server and get it live!

What kind of how-to would this be if I just sat around cooing about my own accomplishments? After all, I just stole the work from other people. And here it is:

Subversion

This page was instrumental in getting subversion up and running properly. A lot of other pages helped/got me started, but in the end I just wiped all of that other crap, and started over from the top of this page. When I finished, Subversion worked. That simple.

One gotcha, noted in the comments, is that for some reason OS X Server Admin seems to be fond of changing the line DAV svn to DAV off. Some vigilance in TextMate prevented this from bringing me down!

I’ll be posting more specifics about my Warehouse experience as soon as it’s actually working ;)

There’s a good how-to over at the RoR Wiki but I’m going to repost a quick & dirty reference here, mostly for my own benefit the next time I go through this.

The point is to ignore sensitive info in the database.yml file, and the ever-changing log & tmp directories. I’m no SVN guru, so feel free to point out flaws in this system.

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My latest rails project involves uploading images, and having them automagically thumbnailed. So far, it isn’t looking so good.

Upload

Google pointed me at the attachment_fu plugin and a how-to by Mike Clark. Attachment Fu was a pretty simple install/config. Now I can upload images.

This is where the fun ends.

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I’d like to point out that I’ve added the functionality of Dynamic Drive to the blog as a simple image gallery. I plan on using it for inline images.

Stolen from here, mostly because its a publicly editable wiki. I had to edit the page and revert a bunch of spammed changes to find anything useful!

Setting up Ecto

1. If you get the account creation wizard the first time you run ecto, just click cancel and dismiss the following error.
2. Click “Add” in the Account Manager.
3. Enter your site’s URL when prompted. Example: http://myweblog.com
4. ecto will attempt to get information about your weblog, but you’ll need to clarify a few things when it’s done as such
   System Other (select API)
   API Movable Type
5. The Access Point should be the same thing as your URL, but add /xmlrpc/api. Example: http://myweblog.com/xmlrpc/api
6. Click ‘Next’ and then enter your username and password (the same info you use to log in to the SimpleLog admin section).
7. Enter anything for the Profile Name. ecto will get your blog information and then ask you a few questions. UNCHECK ALL BOXES and click ‘Next’. Click ‘Finish’ and ecto will get all of your entries.

If you are asked which mode you want to edit in by default, you should choose HTML. You can also set this via the Preferences.

You can now edit, delete and post from ecto!

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Registered a couple new domains in the last day or so, including feedthedroo.com, for my lil bro & bowermandeliveryservice.com,
my dad’s business.

Who knows, I might actually get my monies worth out of this hosting account after all!

Still having random Application failed to load properly errors. A refresh seems to fix it, but doesn’t give me a warm-fuzzy…

Also, I’m trying to install Beast Forums, and I’m having tons of issues with Godaddy’s DB admin page. Luckilly, it only seems to be affecting new databases.

Continued from Part 1

The Godaddy Config (Step 3)

I created a database & user for the SimpleLog program, and FTP’d the program to a subfolder of my hosting root.

At this point, http://bustikated.net/mysimplelogdir/ was giving me Permission Denied errors & http://bustikated.net/mysimplelogdir/public/ was giving me Bad Request errors.

Using the phpMyAdmin db management on Godaddy’s server, I was able to modify the domain preference in the simplelog db. Trial and error later revealed that /public/ had to be present @ the end of the url, for now I just left it blank.

Also, I had to get the IP address of the server from phpMyAdmin (I couldn’t find a server name).

All of this fixed nothing

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Nothing to see here; just making sure all this crap works from my phone.

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I started off at the Simple Log homepage after about a minute and a half of googling Typo alternatives.

My Situation

Since Godaddy doesn’t offer SSH access on its shared hosting accounts, I had to manually configure my install locally, then upload everything. Your process should be similar if you’re also installing without SSH.

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