Biodegradable Geek

Mephisto for the Masses - Installation howto

I’ve recently taken a fancy to Mephisto, a blogging-platform written in Rails. I have nothing against Wordpress, but being in Ruby and using Liquid for themes, Mephisto is far easier (and more fun) to tweak and configure, especially when I want to migrate my sites away from the “blog look” and make them more dynamic. [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Mephisto for the Masses - Installation howto", url: "http://biodegradablegeek.com/2008/10/mephisto-for-the-masses-installation-howto/" });

Script to Quickly Setup WebApp Environment and Domain

Just sharing a script I wrote to quickly deploy Wordpress (and eventually a few other webapps) sites, which somebody might find useful. This uses Linode’s API* to add the domain name to the DNS server along with some subdomains. If you’re using another server, (Slicehost, your own, etc), you can alter the dns class to [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Script to Quickly Setup WebApp Environment and Domain", url: "http://biodegradablegeek.com/2008/10/script-to-quickly-setup-webapp-environment-and-domain/" });

How to POST Form Data Using Ruby

Being able to post data on web forms from your own apps will give you the ability to write tools, services,and provide automation, by interacting with resources already available on the web. This is a very brief example on how this can be accomplished in Ruby, using Net::HTTPand this POST form example. Looking at the source [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "How to POST Form Data Using Ruby", url: "http://biodegradablegeek.com/2008/04/how-to-post-form-data-using-ruby/" });

Introduction to Validations & Validation Error Handling in Rails

Validations in Ruby on Rails are essentially nothing more than methods that ensure that the data in a model is valid before saving it to the database. Traditionally, we validate data coming in using conditional expressions (for example, if email != NULL or if passwd==passwd_confirmation). This task is essential, but boring and tedious, but Rails’ [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Introduction to Validations & Validation Error Handling in Rails", url: "http://biodegradablegeek.com/2008/02/introduction-to-validations-validation-error-handling-in-rails/" });