automagically.co.uk

I've just updated to mephisto 0.8, so please bear with me if there are any errors...

Since I've installed mephisto I've not had the problems that others have, but this is the first time I've upgraded!

Last weekend, I went to Mashed 08, run by my employer, the BBC

During the first morning, several APIs were released and a competition was started with 24 hours to hack/mash an application together, using one of those APIs.

As a BBC employees, myself and my colleagues decided to create an application related to our roles, which it turned out what a "personal, pocket, travel guide" application, which allowed you to create your personalised travel guide for any given city and choose which points of interest you wanted in your guide (we created PDFs).

The APIs we used to create this were the Lonely Planet Developer Network and the Multimap Open API. These allowed us to gather destination and point of interest information (including geo information) and then plot these on the map (that every good application should contain!)

Overall, the weekend went very well, I personally had great fun developing again, and the two APIs we used were very complete, very easy to use and well documented (for what we needed).

We had many enhancements we could have done to the application, but had to succumb to sleep at some point!

Thanks go to the BBC for running the event, apparently last year was just as much fun, but I missed it.

In an update to my previous post, I've decided to move to a VPS package with my host RailsPlayground.

Scout has been fantastic at pointing out, the obvious, in that a FastCGI instance is not holding up my site that gets around 200,000 page views a month (80% from spiders and the like...), and that I need to move to a new configuration.

RailsPlayground have a sale on currently on their VPS, which gives me 512Mb RAM, 20Gb disk space and 200Gb monthly bandwidth for only $25 a month, so I'm going to go for this, for many reasons.

Rails deployment and server setup has been something I've hidden away from for too long, and it's about time I got my hands dirty and knew what I was talking about, instead of just talking a lot...

Does anybody have suggestions for operating system or deployment configurations?

I recently found Scout on a blog post (somewhere I can't find again to link to!), and thought I'd try it out on my Scottish Football Archive website.

To my surprise, it was easy to install on my shared hosting, easy to setup and great to use.

Monitoring my Rails applications has always been something I am interested in learning more about, and how to use the statistics generated to make my application more efficient, as this is the step which always confuses me - I have a lot of data about performance, requests, timings, but what do I do with them?!?

Scout doesn't help me do this (although it does have pretty graphs!) but it does focus me on learning more about this subject.

I'm currently hosting my apps at Rails Playground for $5 a month, and although this is fantastic in terms of price (and most definitely service!), only a few days on Scout has shown me that my application is suffering due to being on a small hosting package, so it's time for an upgrade...

To add another string to my bow, I'm going to learn RSpec in depth, and have an application in mind for writing and learning RSpec via, makes more sense to at least enjoy myself while I'm learning!

Currently I'm working my way through the PeepCode screencasts on the subject, so I might be quiet for the next few days...