knock:on_wood

I created a fork on github to ease deployment of Fat Free CRM to Heroku. I found this great post about doing this very thing, but I wanted something a little simpler.

I was initially enamored with the capistrano like features, yet simplicity of Vlad the Deployer. I spent 2 days getting the “simplifed deploy” working. Well, I thought it was anyway. Turns out that it wasn’t deploying the correct version from git.

I finally did it. I took notes as I built a server and am posting it (mainly so I don’t forget). In case someone wants to print this, I left most of the URLs in text so you’d be able to read them. So here it goes.

I love Heroku, I really do. They have eliminated nearly all of the hassle surrounding deployment and server management in the Ruby/Rails world. Here’s the rub…

My employer called me this summer while I was on vacation at the beach with my family to let me know that the doors to our office would be closed upon my return. Not the best news to get when you’re trying to get refreshed and renew the mind.

I was out on a date with my wife last week and in usual fashion, we popped into a Barnes & Noble. She grabbed the lastest edition of People magazine and I wandered over the the “geek” section to browse what’s new. I picked up Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. I figured I would just skim through it put is back but I got hooked.

Recently, I have been exploring Refinery, a relatively new Rails-based CMS. So far I’ve been very impressed. One of the sites I been implementing in Refinery will be deployed to Heroku which has some constraints which cause the out-of-the-box version of Refinery to fail. Here’s how to get it working if you’re interested.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of Haml and Sass. They simplify and clean up so much HTML-related code. The new version promises some nice new features.

Subversion (SVN) has been a staple of my development process since I ran kicking and screaming out of the Visual SourceSafe (VSS) dungeon many years old. It has served me very well. I used the basic edit-commit-merge life-cycle and all was good. Here’s the strange thing.

Given the rage over XML and web services over the past decade or so, I was shocked at how common it is to still exchange data using a fixed-width file format over FTP. I guess it’s all about those mainframes and backward compatibility, but “WOW”.