Inaugural first post! :)

Lookin’ good mate..

You’ll have to do a write up of the rails process to get something live: textdrive versus MT.

Lookin’ great Dimitry! Subscribed. I’d also suggest adding a link href your feed so it is auto-discovered by browsers.

Joel: Good idea. It’s really a different world. (mt) allows you to install Gems as you have your own container, while TextDrive is a shared hosting account, which means, you’re confined to only those Gems pre-installed on the server (although they have a lot, versions differ and that breaks things as I’ve found out the hard way).

Paul: Awesome, thanks for the code :) I’ll have to add a bunch of small little things to the blog that usually come with a blog engine like what you’ve mentioned, save commenter info, etc. Time to copy&paste

Oh I guess I didn’t think about that.. are you not using anything for your CMS? Is this site RoR-powered?

Damn, I didn’t read it all the way through..

This blog runs on a custom content management system built from grown up in Ruby on Rails as a learning project, so expect some bugs.

I love it. Welcome to the nets!

Homerun! Beautiful looking site buddy. I have a great new personal project that would greatly benefit from your personal touch. Interested?

Hey,

I’m a (web) friend of Paul’s. He’s told me about your site a few times, but this is the first time I’ve checked it out. Very nice, I love the design. And I’d really love to take a look at the backend code if you ever feel like sharing, or whatever :)... I’ve been hacking around with ruby a bit lately, and a project this size would be fun to play with—big enough to be interesting, but not so big that it’s overwhelming.

I just graduated from Virginia Tech, and I’ll also be moving to San Francisco in mid July (with my girlfriend). I’m taking a job with Accenture starting in mid August. We found a pretty sweet apartment on Stockton street about 3 blocks from union square. Should be fun. Shoot me an email or IM me (Paul has my contact info), maybe we can go bar hopping on the Barbary Coast sometime :P.

Mike: Damn, you’re lucky to have a place already. We’re checking craigslist daily and not gonna start hunting until after we get there. No time to fly out earlier, but hopefully we’ll find something.

We’ll be moving in a couple of weeks (June 15th), but yeah, let me know when you get in and we’ll definitely get together.

P.S. I’m definitely up for some clubbing/bars

dimitry: you might want to auto filter the “website” to add “http://” if it isn’t entered. Added “catcher” ;)

I think Joel was referring to this .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^youtilize\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ <a href="http://youtilize.com/" target="_blank">http://youtilize.com/</a>$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.youtilize\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ <a href="http://youtilize.com/" target="_blank">http://youtilize.com/</a>$1 [R=301,L]

Also, before too many people start linking to you, I would consider your permalink structure. I’m not a fan of ”/blog”, it adds an extra unnecessary element to the link length. Unless you were planning on making something at youtilize.com as a homepage later on.

Joel: Yeah, I spent some time today finding a useful Rails function for this, but I don’t think there is one. I’m not sure how to write one of my own for this to be honest. Any suggestions? I feel like there should be an easy solution!

Paul: He meant links for users’ websites in comments break if you don’t write full http:// (Check out Noah’s link).

I’m currently working on rewriting routes for the site in order to drop the whole /blog/ part. Thanks for the suggestion!

http://youtilize.com works without www. as it is. I think it’s setup to do both already :)

No I was just saying that with those htaccess rules it forces no-www. Now that youtilize works with www and no-www, search engines will consider it two different sites which can hurt your ranking if ppl link to you with and without the www.

http://no-www.org

Gotcha! Adding the rules right now :) By the way, no more /blog/ in URLs.

hmmm – interesting.

Commentful Watchlist gives the individual comment count on your how to rails at twenty two – the total number of comments.

o.O

Joel: I just checked out their site and didn’t notice ‘Implementation’ page or anything for developers (with custom blog engines).

Thanks for the note :)

Nice site Dimitry. I’ve been wanting to jump into Ruby on Rails for a while now. Looking forward to keeping up with the content… thanks for changing it to full-text RSS.

Very pleasant design. Nice work Dimitry.