Mat Harvard

Experimental Caching

2009-11-01T23:58:46-08:00

I've added some caching around the site to speed things up a bit. The biggest hang time right now is when Passenger starts up (as my site doesn't receive a whole lot of traffic, it goes sleepy mode often). Hopefully it makes a difference, but we'll see!

Preview Your Comments

2009-10-25T16:06:38-07:00

You're now able to preview your comments! I spent a little while today fiddling with JavaScript and Rails to get it working nicely. It's really easy to use, just type your comment, hit the preview button, it will apply all my formatting rules to it, the form will be hidden, and a preview pane will appear with your fancy comment in it. The preview pane allows you to save your comment, or to edit it some more.

The Orange Seed

2009-10-24T01:18:58-07:00

Silent as a ninja, The Orange Seed makes its debut. Who: Richard Neary, Sunny Hundal and my self. What: A tumblelog. Where: http://theorangeseed.com/. When: October 22nd to infinity. Why: I've always wanted a tumblelog, and having one written in Rails is even cooler.

The source code is available on GitHub!

Thinking About Sphinx

2009-10-23T20:24:29-07:00

I just finished installing Sphinx on my slice, and setting up Thinking Sphinx on my website. Previously I was just using a simple search method in my Post model, but it was always a little on the slow side, especially now since I've started to publish more posts. Getting Sphinx running on my development machine was simple thanks to this article. Installing it on the slice was also easy (./configure; make; make install).

The only down-side was the need to manually index and start the Sphinx server. Hello crontab, rake and capistrano.

Capistrano is mainly just for utility, so I can quickly start/stop/index from my local machine.

I put these tasks under the deploy namespace:

desc "Index Sphinx"
task :sphinx_index do
  run "/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-20090928/bin/rake -f /var/www/matharvard.ca/current/Rakefile thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production"
end

desc "Start Sphinx"
task :sphinx_start do
  run "/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-20090928/bin/rake -f /var/www/matharvard.ca/current/Rakefile thinking_sphinx:start RAILS_ENV=production"
end

desc "Stop Sphinx"
task :sphinx_stop do
  run "/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-20090928/bin/rake -f /var/www/matharvard.ca/current/Rakefile thinking_sphinx:stop RAILS_ENV=production"
end

Here's the line in my crontab file.

* 0 * * * /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-20090928/bin/rake -f /var/www/matharvard.ca/current/Rakefile thinking_sphinx:index 
RAILS_ENV=production

This runs the rake command every day at midnight. As you can see, I'm using Ruby Enterprise Edition, though it probably won't make a difference if I used regular Ruby for this.

I also had to switch from SQLite3 to MySQL, in order to use Sphinx, which was easily accomplished by YamlDb!

Updated Design

2009-10-21T23:54:08-07:00

Since Apple just released a bunch of new products, I thought it would be right for me to release my latest product. So here it is, a new design! It doesn't quite deserve the term “product”, I know.

The only product I'm working on is a tumblelog, which I've hinted to in previous posts. Everything is basically complete, it just needs a final polishing before it's good to go. Look for it by the end of this week.

Update: Currently experimenting with my recently listened tracks from Last.fm in the sidebar. It's parsing the feed and displaying it at the moment, but I might experiment with aggregation if it impacts performance too much (which it seems to be doing). Update Two: It was too slow, working on an aggregator.