slaggle dot com

So I’ve made a few upgrades to slaggle.com over the past few days. One major one is a change in backend architecture. We’re now running on nginx + fastcgi + php instead of apache2 with the php module. The site is running a lot quicker now and I’m excited about it. The ultimate goal is to migrate to mephisto running on Ruby on Rails, but I need to test out database migrations first.

I also upgraded to the latest Wordpress after feeling the sting of a spammer exploit. Someone managed to inject their own text into a frontpage post when I was on Wordpress 2.1! My mind was boggled, so now I am doing even more due-diligence to make sure the blog software stays patched.

With the migration to 2.5, I’ve switched to a pre-fabbed theme for now, which reflects the direction I’d like to start going with my sites. I’m starting to dig red for the primary color instead of the drab blues and greens.

For the Rails guys in the audience, Ruby on Rails 2.1 was officially released at RailsConf this year. 2.1 adds a lot of features I’ve been looking forward to for a while (and using via edge rails) so I’m excited to see them in action.

Here are some of the features that I find useful:

Migrations are now versioned with a timestamp instead of a sequential number, which is a big deal for a team of developers. Your migrations have a much lower chance of stepping on each other now.

In your environment.rb file you can now list out the gems your application requires, making it easier to maintain what your app needs to run.

Supporting multiple timezones in your application is now dead simple.

To get a rundown on how to use these new features, check out Ryan Bates’ Rails 2.1 Railscasts episodes.