BenCurtis.com

It says something about the sorry state of my blogging lately that my blog is the last place I'm announcing my latest project, Juicer. :) It's a handy service for offloading image uploading and resizing from your web app. Now you don't have to tie up your server to handle long uploads or to do a bunch of thumbnails. You can keep your app super-responsive for the core of what it does, and leave the uploads and resizes to us.

Though my blog is the last place I announced the project, it'll be the first place I announce the Ruby gem that goes along with it. :) I just published a gem that uses the Juicer API (via RestClient) and makes it pretty easy to integrate Juicer with a Rails 3 app. I've done the hard work of getting the direct-to-s3 upload with swfupload working for you, so all you have to do is make a few tweaks to your model and you have uploads and thumbnails done for you. You can get at the gem (and a sample Rails 3 app) at Github.

We'll be posting more about Juicer at the Juicer blog, but I imagine I'll mention things about it here from time to time. :) And hopefully I'll get around to posting some of the fun code-related things that make up the service.

Recently I've had a couple of clients choose Amazon EC2 for their deployment environments, so I've been spending more time playing with EC2 lately than I ever had before. I set out to create a repeatable and time-efficient deployment process, and the result of my work is an easy to use ruby script, detailed below.

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