Ruby Enterprise, Passenger and Encoding hell
Today I spent several hours with my friend Gleb trying to find a weird bug we we’re having importing some rss feeds.
We have a rake task that will grab an xml feed and import it to our system. When we call this rake task from the command line it would run fine, but if we run it from inside our application, we would get some wrong characters (you know, the usual ???) in the imported items.
Emacs support for Jekyll
If you’re using emacs to write your jekyll blog posts, there is a mode to help you with some common tasks. It is originally from metajack. Recently I thought it could be a nice addition to have syntax highlight support for jekyll posts, so I got my hands dirty and after some hours of lisp hacking (this was my first attempt at lisp programming) it was a reallity. It is based on nxhtml so you need it to work.
Setting environment to run migrations with capistrano ext
If you’re using capistrano-ext to deploy to a different server, using a custom environment, you’ve probably noticed that it always tries to run the migrations for the production environment, like this:
cd path_to_app/deploy/releases/20100309152738; rake RAILS_ENV=production db:migrateDigging through capistrano’s source I found the solution is really simple, just set the rails_env variable to the environment you want, in this example staging. So inside config/deploy/staging.rb
set :rails_env, "staging"Then when migrations get executed they’ll have RAILS_ENV=staging.
Monthly archives for Jekyll
Recently I moved my blog to Jekyll, while being able to write stuff directly in my favorite editor EMACS, there was some functionality that I was missing from my previous custom blog engine, such as archives. Looking at how I could achieve this, I found Raoul Felix approach to the problem. Instead of patching jekyll, he wrote a small library that wraps around it, called jekyll_ext. Using it was really easy, and based on some of the extensions he created, I was able to provide this functionality in my site.
Although I had archives generated for me, I was still missing a way to display this information on my site, so I decided to create my own extension.
View your emails with cucumber
I’ve been developing some new mailers at work, and I’ve found it really helpful to be able to view the emails as they are sent to the users. So I’ve implemented a cucumber step to help me achieve that, inspired on a similar webrat step for web pages.