PLANET ARGON Monthly Newsletter, May 10, 2006

Robby Russell — Sun, 14 May 2006 08:56:00 -0500

(copy/pasted from email)

New Business Level Rails Hosting Plans
New Rails Application Audit Service
Jeremy Signs Book Deal with O’Reilly
Robby and Jeremy speak at Canada on Rails
Ruby on Rails Podcast features PLANET ARGON
Project Borat
New Face at PLANET ARGON
New PLANET ARGON Documentation Project
Upcoming Events

New Business Level Rails Hosting Plans Launched

As a PLANET ARGON newsletter subscriber you are one of the first to hear about our new suite of business class hosting plans. Are you are seeking a cost effective solution for hosting your business critical Rails application, but aren’t ready for a dedicated server? Our Rails Business Hosting plans are just what you are looking for! More bandwidth, more disk space, more ram and fewer neighbors. Forget about the perils of sharing a server with a couple hundred users. The Rails Business Hosting plans limit the number of users on a server to no more than 15.

“All of the service and support of a shared server,” says David Gibbons, PLANET ARGON’s Lead Systems Administrator. “You’ll never have to worry about the headaches of server administration, but you still reap the benefits from being one of a select few having to share resources.”

For more information on the Rails Business Hosting plans, please visit: http://www.planetargon.com/rails_business_hosting.html

New Rails Audit Service

PLANET ARGON has a new service for businesses building web applications with Ruby on Rails: A $2500, 48 hour turn-around code audit and analysis.

“We built this service specifically for businesses wanting expert advice on how to improve and optimize their Rails applications,” says Peat Bakke, the Project Director at PLANET ARGON. “A little guidance makes a big difference, especially with development teams who are new to Rails.”

The audit provides recommendations tailored to your Rails application that might include optimizing database interactions, improving test coverage, simplifying AJAX interactions, automation with Rake, RESTful behaviors, and plugins.

For more information on our new audit service, contact us today: http://www.planetargon.com/contact.html

Jeremy Signs Book Deal with O’Reilly

We are very excited to announce that Jeremy Voorhis, PLANET ARGON’s very own Lead Architect, has signed a deal with leading technical book publisher, O’Reilly Media. Jeremy will be writing Rails in a Nutshell, part of the popular Nutshell series. This means that PLANET ARGON has not one, but two authors writing books about Ruby on Rails! Congratulations Jeremy!

For more information and to sign up for email updates, visit: http://www.railsinanutshell.com/

Robby and Jeremy speak at Canada on Rails

Where were Robby and Jeremy on April 14? They were both speaking at the Canada on Rails conference in Vancouver, BC. Robby presented Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System, and Jeremy talked about Globalizing Rails.

Robby shared his insight about bending ActiveRecord’s conventions to work with a legacy database and gave a live demonstration of how this could be done with Dell’s freely available video store database. Check out the presentation slides for Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System at http://rubyurl.com/DRv

Jeremy shared his experiences from developing and using the Globalize plugin to internationalize Rails applications. This covers the Globalize basics as well as tips and tricks for designing your application. View the presentation for Internationalizing Rails at http://rubyurl.com/1WQ

PLANET ARGON currently has a site in production that supports 18 languages and is fully translatable through the web. PLANET ARGON is also the hosting sponsor of the Globalize project, which can be found at http://www.globalize-rails.org/.

For those of you who were unable to join us in Vancouver, Robby has collected informative links from Canada on Rails including many of the speakers’ slides. Check it out at: http://rubyurl.com/gZG

Even better, you can hear more from both Robby and Jeremy at RailsConf in Chicago this June.

Ruby on Rails Podcast features PLANET ARGON

Be sure to check out one of the latest Ruby on Rails Podcasts recorded in Vancouver, BC at the Canada on Rails conference earlier in April. Jeremy Voorhis and Robby Russell, both speakers at the event, had a chance to sit down with Geoffrey Grosenbach to discuss PLANET ARGON development practices, projects, deployment, books, and our involvement in the the Rails community.

Listen now! http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/

Project Borat

Project Borat is a top secret development project here at PLANET ARGON. It’s a big project with high expectations, a fairly tight delivery schedule, an open ended feature set, and flexible priorities. The Client has extensive startup experience, expertise in the target market and some rather good ideas.

What is it? We can’t tell you. Who’s The Client? We can’t say. What does it do? Sorry. When will we see it? Nope.

How are you building it? Ahh .. yes. That’s something we will enthusiastically blog about in the months to come.

Check out Robby’s first installment at: http://rubyurl.com/BqJ

PLANET ARGON Documentation Project

David Gibbons, PLANET ARGON’s resident Systems Administrator, recently launched a new website for the PLANET ARGON hosting community, which hopes to bring together the PLANET ARGON staff and customers to develop some first class documentation for managing your hosting account at PLANET ARGON. Tutorials ranging from installing PostgreSQL to using Capistrano with PLANET ARGON have been created and maintained by many of our customers. We encourage all our existing customers to stop by and see how you can help out and hopefully you’ll learn a few tricks!

A big thank you goes out to the PLANET ARGON customers who have helped seed the project and to those of you who will continue to build upon it.

Visit the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project: http://docs.planetargon.com/

New Face at PLANET ARGON

The demand for Ruby on Rails development is growing, and PLANET ARGON is growing to meet the demand! Meet Brian Ford, the newest addition to our development team. He’s not on our about page yet, but in the meantime you can check out his blog at (http://blog.brightredglow.com/).

Upcoming Events

Argon Express, June 19-21—Portland, OR to Chicago, IL [http://www.theargonexpress.com]
RailsConf 2006, June 22-25—Chicago, IL [http://www.railsconf.com]

Until next time—

The PLANET ARGON Core Team

Robby, Allison, Jeremy, David, Jason, Peat, and Brian

Robby on Rails: PLANET ARGON Monthly Newsletter, May 10, 2006