artem: also, this is mostly completely unrelated

artem: but there is a restaurant in chicago

artem: which serves pigeon

artem: i had some this past weekend

artem: and it was delicious

Kaon: nice

“The race is long and in the end, its only with yourself”

Progress on Domain Pigeon (DP from now on) has going well. Several weeks ago I estimated the site was about 90% complete, which turned out to be very optimistic. Deploying a Rails app, especially for someone with no experience, takes time to do properly. I also made the mistake of not writing unit tests until recently. The “Aha!” moment came the first time I saw DP running on Dreamhost and realized there wasn’t an easy way to make sure everything worked properly.

Lesson Learned: When the roads are covered with fog, plan for extra travel time.

Lesson Learned: Prepare thoroughly. When it comes time act, you’ll be glad you did.

The plan was to launch several days ago, but some last minute preparation and a ski trip this weekend has postponed it.  I’d like to be around to respond to the initial feedback and to address any problems that arise.

Also, updated the blog layout, as the old one was, well, bleh.

And finally, a good FastCompany article titled “What Should I Do with My Life“, courtesy of HackerNews. Here’s a quote:

But the article itself flipped that connotation inside-out. It argued that with the economy in a tailspin, it was unsound economic theory to have millions of drone workers shuffling to work every day doing jobs at quarter-speed they didn’t care about, so they weren’t very productive at, and certainly didn’t add value at. The economy would never get kick-started if our workforce was uninspired and didn’t innovate. So the article — really a manifesto — suggested that the way to get business going again was for its basic building blocks — the workers — to do something they were really good at, or were inspired by, or cared about, where they would work extra hard, and innovate their way out of this black hole. Now it was not a permission slip to quit your job, nor a doctor’s note to take a year off (I’ve never taken more than two weeks off in 23 years), but it did suggest the economy might be better off, long-term, if the square pegs found their square holes and the round pegs found their round holes, rather than everyone just wondering where the next big thing would be and gravitate to it like moths.

Right now my main priority is getting an alpha version of Domain Pigeon launched. It turns out deploying it isn’t as easy as uploading a few files like it was with PHP.

The last three days can neatly be summed up by this post’s title and for a bit of elaboration I…

– Learned how to use Github to host a repository

– Finally had a need to learn and use SSH

– Re-learned how to use Git, as I haven’t been using it nearly as much as I should have

– Learned how to use Capistrano to deploy a Rails application and how to deal with a mess load of error messages that pop up when you do things incorrectly…

Here are some good resources for anyone else looking for information on these topics:

Github’s Git Cheatsheet

Capistrano’s Getting Started Article

Deploying Rails on Dreamhost with Passenger (there are several Dreamhost/Passenger/Capistrano articles out there but this was the best and most recent)

Github’s Deploying with Capistrano

Suso.org’s SSH Tutorial

Unix File Permissions

Philly.rb Google Group (thanks guys for the help)

Hack for using deploy:web:disable with Passenger

Peepcode’s Capistrano Video

About sixteen hours of the command line, trouble shooting, and dozens of tutorials later, a web page miraculously appeared! (It seems so easy in hindsight)

And now comes the fun part… prepping for actual people.