BenCurtis.com

The new plugin directory has been well received and is off to a good start. I have recently added XML interfaces (just send the ‘Accept: application/xml’ header to the various plugin pages to see it), and the ability for plugin authors to add a password to a plugin entry when creating it to be able to come back later to edit it. Before that I added a scrape-friendly page that allows the Rails command-line plugin script to discover the repositories of plugins indexed at the site.

I really liked the ideas from Trevor Squires on the mailing list about having feeds for every plugin that authors could update and users could track to keep tabs on the releases, etc., of various plugins. I’ll probably be adding that functionality next.

Another feature I think would be great is to add searching to the Rails plugin script just like ‘apt-cache search’ from Debian. It would simply pass the search off to the AWD site and list the results just like it currently lists all available plugins.

There have been other great feature ideas from people on the mailing lists, which I’ll be getting to as soon as I can. Feel free to add other ideas to the comments of this post.

A little bit of pain is OK if the end result is good, right? Visitors to Tesly and the new Rails plugin directory might have noticed some problems accessing the site last night. Lighttpd + FastCGI + Rails decided to get a little unhappy and hosed the sites. So, I switched to Lighttpd + Mongrel + Rails and all is well.

I should have made the switch sooner, as it is rock solid. As the FastCGI listeners were spiraling to their deaths last night, I noticed periods of continued respawning. I hadn’t changed anything (isn’t that always the case?), so I had little clue as to the cause. Of course, by paving over FastCGI with Mongrel, I’ll never know, but I can live with that. Everything is working fine now — memory use is stable, load is low and steady, and the apps are peppy.

The only problem I’ve had is that the exception_notification plugin’s 404 handler doesn’t seem to be working. Hopefully nothing’s wrong with the 500 handler. :)

Ben W. and I got back from Canada on Rails last night, and we had a great time. Especially fun was the ride home where between the two of us we came up with five or so ideas for cool projects to do. More on that later.

The conference rocked. You are lucky if you have tickets to RailsConf, as I’m sure it’s going to rock, too. The presentations I most enjoyed were from David, Dave Astels, James Adam, and Michael Buffington. Armageddon is amazing, BDD is a big deal for us testing nuts, Rails Engines are darned handy, and you can’t help but get excited about whatever Michael decides to talk about. :)

I got to meet David and laugh with him about how he ripped into me with his blog post last year. He was a little surprised that I didn’t get turned off to Rails, but I assured him Rails was just too good to be driven away that easily.

At the end of David’s presentation there was a little chat about plugins, and the poor state of the wiki with respect to plugins, and so I decided to get off my rear and finally implement the idea I’ve had for a while. Someone on the Rails mailing list a while back asked whether there was an RAA for Rails, and at the time I thought it would be great to have a more structured plugin directory. Being motivated by those comments after David’s presentation, I managed to bang it out during the conference. Check out the plugin directory. I scraped a minimal amount of content from the wiki plugins page (I’ll add more content soon), but now you can see all the plugins, add your own, and rate them. I’m hoping this will help people coming to Rails to find the best tools more quickly. I plan to add search and maybe a few more things to make it an excellent resource for Rails.