old-blog.tonyconfrey.net

I’m doing a bunch of reading in various areas to get caught up to the state of the art for a project I’m now involved with. We’re building an RIA on RAILS to integrate with Facebook and trade in Flash animations. Its taking up pretty much all my available time but I’m gonna try to put a few short blog entries together to capture where I am on a few of the steeply upward sloping learning curves.

RIAs on RAILS

I’m reading the book Ajax on Rails. Its pretty cool stuff. You write code almost entirely in Ruby on the back end with Javascript created on the fly to pass to the client. The Scriptalicious and Prototype Javascript libraries are totally integrated into the RAILS framework and so most of the UI logic is implemented fully in Ruby. The whole stack makes putting together RIA’s very simple (at least in theory). On the back end the integrated stack of MVC components seems to make implementation very efficient.

I’m drowning a bit in all the gory details and haven’t been able to devote much time to Ruby so I have few anchor points as I read and am probably missing a lot at this point. I’m hoping the whole thing degrades gracefully as you move outside its areas of strength. It seems like very rich soil in which to plant an application and at this point I think its the right choice for my purposes.

I also did a little investigation in to the Amazon Associates program. Signing up was trivial. There are a few ways you can go with them. The spectrum ranges from an engine which can generate adds for you off site totally under their control, to a set of screens which generate javascript to embed in your site to display adds for specific products. I don’t know what information they base their recommendations on. They’re going to give me 4% of sales generated thru my links for the first 7 sales and then up it to 6%. So please feel free to click thru and buy the Ajax on Rails book, it’l help me experiment with their back end reporting mechanism!

Well I made the decision to go with WordPress as my blogging software, got it installed on a new blogging sub-domain and now I’m checking out a first post.

See my manifesto if you navigated here directly.

In the spirit of tracking the process, let me note that getting to the point of having a home page on the Internet and a working blog has taken a lot more time and effort than I would have predicted. I’ll try to capture the outlines of getting an initial web presence in place here in my first post, cover getting started with blogging asap but in a different post, and then stay more up to date with it moving forward.

I knew that over time I intend to build up a knowledge base, some of it public, some with restricted access, using tools such as blogs, wikis, content management systems, bookmarking tools and whatever else is currently out there or evolving. Knowledge representation and presentation are topics of great interest to me so I see my current exploratory activities as an opportunity to educate myself, see what works for me, and see if theres anything I can improve upon.

I spent a while looking at hosted services like WordPress and Blogger for blogs; and wikispaces, wikidot and OpenGarden for wikis. All of these look like good services. There were even a few (like Squarespace) which combined multiple functions. IMO if you are just looking to get a blog out there WordPress.com is the way to go, they’ll even give you a domain name. I’m not sure what advantages Blogger gives you in terms of integration with other google apps but WP just seemed a bit more professional looking. See my delicious links and comments for more on what I looked at.

The alternative to being hosted, obviously, is to roll your own. The consensus on the tradeoffs seems to be as follows.

• Hosting your own tools takes more time and effort but gives you more control, if you are technically inclined enough to make it work and care about that level of control.
• Theres a potential issue of handing off your intellectual property to a third party who may go out of business or get acquired.
• Going with a hosted service means that if you ever get slashdotted your site is more likely to stay up, but if you start generating a lot of traffic its easier to monetize it on a private server.

Since part of my goal here is exploration I decided to self host my site content. My buddy Paul is hard core and has his own hardware set up in someones data center, I’m not that geeky so I looked in to web hosting. My first google click got me what looks like a great resource (top-10-web-hosting) which I have not cross checked with any other information sources. The top rated host - HostMonster seemed to check out fine so I went with them. I knew I wanted to use tonyconfrey.net (rather than confrey.com, which I’ve owned for a while but only use to host personal permanent email addresses). It turned out that with upfront payment for a years hosting (~$80) HM threw in the domain registration, so I registered tonyconfrey.net as I signed up.

At this point in the saga I get into the business of hosting a web server!

Earlier this week I wrote up my manifesto and used iWeb on my mac to create a web site with a first page and not much else. Host Monster gives you a graphical browser-based control panel for site management. I fiddled around with its ftp tool before I discovered I could install a WebDAV client which shows my servers file structure as a mounted volume on my laptop. With that in place it was pretty easy to export directly from iWeb to the site on the Internet. I have run into some issues whereby I seem to need to ‘eject’ the mounted volume to get the server to see the change, but once you learn your way through the maze its pretty trivial. Despite the basic-ness of the content it was pretty cool to have Nancy and Nick look it up on their machines and see it out there on the public Internet.

OK, I think that’ll do as a proof of concept first post. Feel free to post a comment or just fire me an email if you’re trying to retrace my steps and want some input.

Tony