Robby on Rails

Yesterday afternoon, we were helping our newest employee, Paige Saez, get setup with new accounts across all of our applications. She uses Google Reader and couldn’t understand why her Basecamp RSS wasn’t working in it. We explained that Google doesn’t provide any way to subscribe to authenticated feeds (yet)... so it wasn’t something she could do. (I still use NetNewsWire because of this problem…)

During the discussion, I said that it probably wouldn’t take much effort to build a proxy for an authenticated feed… and Andy said he’d give it a shot.

10 minutes later… he had an initial version of a RSS proxy application, written in Ruby.

15 minutes after that, we had it up and running on a private server for all of us at PLANET ARGON to begin using.

...and here is the proof!

Wee! Authenticated Basecamp RSS feeds in Google reader. It even works with the openid authentication.

You can grab the code from Andy’s blog post and finally make the switch off of desktop RSS readers to Google Reader, because you know you want to. ;-)

Thanks Andy!

Yesterday, I announced the new Ruby on Rails Deployment group, which has attracted over 200 people and boasts over 50 messages in just the first 24 hours of it’s life.

While this is a greater turnout than I expected… I made a huge mistake yesterday. I forgot to invite the man behind the cutrain.

14:25 < zedas> robbyonrails: rubyonrails-deployment and i wasn't invited?
14:26 < zedas> i think i need to revoke some licenses. :-)
...
14:26 < jarkko> sounds robby just lost his mudcrap belt

I forgot to invite… Zed Shaw.

Zed,

I know that I’ve only met you briefly, but I feel like I’ve known you for years. With each and every mongrel I install, configure, and start… you’re always… right there… with me. This love goes deep.

Please forgive me for not inviting you to the show. I’ve asked the person sitting in the first row to move back a few rows to an empty seat… so you can sit here… right here… with me.

Please accept this letter and invite as an apology.

Robby

For everyone else, we have a few seats available near the back of the room, which you can reserve here. ...but before you do, be sure to recommend his work. [1]

¹ king of the world

Oveheard in #caboose.

< imajes> where's zed when you need him
< court3nay> zed's dead
< court3nay> ...baby
< quellhorst> zed was attacked by a cluster of mean mongrels

A few weeks ago, I started using FeedBurner and posted a blog entry about how I configured Lighttpd to handle that so it didn’t disrupt everyone that subscribes to my RSS feed. This was working great… until the other day.. when I upgraded to Typo trunk. When I did this, I decided to start using mongrel::cluster and pound. Two days later… I’m noticing that my subscriber count has dropped over thousand people in a day… was it something that I said?

A ha! I was handling the redirect with Lighttpd and had replaced it with Pound.

So, I am now delegating this to Apache.

  # Redirect typo feeds to FeedBurner
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*$
  RewriteRule /xml/(atom|rss|rss20)/feed.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails [R=temp,L]

...and all was well again.

UPDATE

The rewrite condition should be !^FeedBurner.*$ not !^FeedBurner$.

We’ve been encouraging our Rails hosting customers to give Pound and Mongrel a try for deploying their Ruby on Rails applications. David Gibbons has been adding some recipes for doing this on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project

Check out:

• Pound and Mongrel
• Running with Mongrel

...and today David posted an article on his blog titled, Why you need multiple mongrel instances with rails!