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Remember when getting a rails app running took 4 cans of Redbull and an afternoon of googling? Ahh the good old days. Over on our articles site, Paul has new tutorials up on installing mod_rails and using it to serve your app. Should take you all of 2 minutes. Kids today have it so easy.

My wife is an excellent cook. I can get by if the recipe is detailed enough (how much is a pinch??). Mike Bailey has given us a great deployment and server setup tool in deprec, but it seems that folks still have some problems getting up and running with it. In my opinion the utlimate usefuleness and time savings of deprec and capistrano is worth the initial cost of actually learning how to use it.

Here is a short walk through that hopefully will help highlight the startup process, and also help us keep track of some of the common issues/pitfalls.

Topfunky has an awesome screencast (peepcode) showing you how to setup a Rails stack with Capistrano deployment features on an Ubuntu server from an OS X development environment, using the deprec gem. And it’s free. I’m a big fan of the Peepcode screencasts, just a great idea. I look forward to them each month.

Peepcode – Rails stack on Ubuntu using deprec

You might also want to check out Craig Ambrose’s article on using deprec w/ a Slicehost VPS. I haven’t played with deprec much but plan to soon.

Details here, all mongrel users should update the gem immediately.

A great looking tool for performance monitoring, the Mysql Query Analyzer plugin can help you find bottlenecks. Very handy for troubleshooting DB performance on your Slice.

Want Ruby on Rails goodness for your Slice in less than 5 minutes? Checkout the 5-minute Rails Install on our Wiki. Enjoy!

The guy behind the Ruby on Rails podcasts (topfunky) has started a unique service called Peepcode. Every month, he releases a video tutorial, usually about an hour long, that costs $9. Honestly, when I first read the announcement, I thought it sounded novel, but couldn’t imagine myself using it. I skipped the first episode on RJS templates. But when the second episode came out, covering Textmate Basics, I bit. I’ve been longing for a quick tutorial exposing me to some of the more advanced Textmate features and hoped this would be it.

All I can say now? What a fantastic idea! I highly recommend this service – excellent quality, quite effective and reasonably priced. I wasn’t sure if a video would help me “learn”, as I tend to be more of the book type, but it was a neat experience. I’m looking forward to future releases. And hats off to Topfunky for a fresh approach. RoR, despite our feelings, is still bleeding edge. A video tutorial is a fast, effective way to keep people abreast of the latest and greatest. And an order of magnitude advantage over dead tree competitors.

Our favorite framework turns 3.

So for my (delayed) celebration of Rails turning two years old, I salute all early adopters who dared stick their neck out and be the subject of ridicule from their suspicious peers.

Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake.

This blog started as a Wordpress install. Between us, we have a few other blogs, most Typo and a few others (Textpattern, Blogger). Wordpress seemed like a good choice and it’s always fun to try new software. I set it up, sent out the passwords and identified a few things I liked: fonts, posting UI, comment management and anti-spam techniques. But I missed Typo. Within 24 hours, I couldn’t take it anymore, wiped the install and switched.

There’s nothing wrong with Wordpress, it just wasn’t for me. It felt busy. I think it’s a great piece of software for people who quickly want to setup a blog and never look under the hood. But that’s not us.

The lack of development on the Typo front turned me off for a while, but the team has rebounded nicely with a superb 4.0 release and great install package. Much easier from the initial 2.x version I installed and highly recommended. Mongrel support built in!