Rails Page Caching with Subdomains and Advanced Cache Invalidation Cron

Continuing to fight the good fight against Rails’ slowness and processor intensive handicap, I have been working a lot with page caching over the last day. I think I finally have a decent setup now. This write up talks about the Rails side of caching. This assumes that apache is serving up cached pages just fine. This also assumes you are using sub domains and have somewhat advanced...

Mongrel Rails + mod_proxy + mod_rewrite configuration for caching

Now that the Adamantine Arts site is getting more traffic, I wanted to implement page caching to really speed things up and prevent excessive server load. I’ll discuss page caching in Rails in more detail at another time. The problem at hand however was to get apache, mongrel, mod_proxy, and mod_rewrite to all play nice together. My initial stabs at the problem gave me all sorts of grief....

Building “Tag Cloud” in Rails

I am working on the new search engine for Adamantine Arts and wanted to display the top 25 queries. I thought it would be nice to display the searches in the cool tag cloud form where the more popular the search the larger the text. So quick tutorial on how to build a tag cloud in Rails. Hurray for logarithms lately. They are all over the search code. Criteria : - Use percent based fonts to...

Storing Social Security Numbers in Rails…

For the forth coming store for Adamantine Arts, artists will be able to sell  print, originals, etc via our site. Since this is an affiliate program of sorts, we need to keep track of SSN/EIN and more for tax purposes (CC and other billing info is kept with PayPal – I’ll let them worry about their security). So with all the reports of laptops stolen containing spreadsheets of plain...