Bicycle Transportation

November 28, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Eric Richardson

I took this photo for a blogdowntown post today, and I really love how it came out.

Shot with the kit Sony 18-70 3.5-5.6 at 50mm f/5.6, 1/125sec exposure. Taken crouched in the curbside lane during a break in traffic.

Two Random Rails Notes

November 27, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I spent a chunk of the evening getting up to speed on how you're actually supposed to deploy Rails applications, figuring that my method of manually starting a server on some arbitrary point and pointing Apache at it probably wasn't recommended.

For both this site and blogdowntown I've set up mongrel clusters behind a pound balancer, roughly following instructions here and here. I don't currently have the mongrel clusters running out of init, but I think that should be the last step to getting things happy.

I'm been messing around with ambition, a plugin for writing database queries via Ruby. It's not that I think SQL is anything hard, it's just that there's a certain appeal in a query like:

live = Post::STATUS_LIVE
@aposts = Post.select { |p|
    p.status == live && p.users.id == @author.id
}.sort_by { |p| -p.timestamp }.first(3)

So far I'm just using it in a few places on the periphery of the blogdowntown code, but I'm intrigued.

Testing the New Interface

November 27, 2007 by Eric Richardson

After letting this blog sit abandoned for months I've finally gotten around to giving it a bit of love. I've pulled over the code from blogdowntown and basically just stolen most of the design and style. The eventual goal is to merge whatever bits are going to remain from ericrichardson.com into this site and push everything back together. For now I'll try to start with just making a blog post every now and again.

I can't say that in the design process I was really working with the irony of using a No Stopping sign on a blog that hasn't had a post in months, but I'll go ahead and take credit for it anyway.