Staying up entirely too late working on a project tonight I was sent a link for this really interesting way to generate dynamic CSS files using Ruby on Rails.

If you ever longed to use variables for repetitive things like color or background images you will love this too.

Most likely this will be powering a portion of our user-customizable interface in Cashboard.

Just stumbled across this cool DHTML color picker. I haven’t jumped into the source yet, but the functionality is insane for a web control.

Hrm….might be useful for an upcoming project or two.

We need more power!

I just completed a major upgrade to our main production web host box.

Apache 2.0 / FCGI just wasn’t cutting it any more. I wanted speed, I wanted the new hotness…I wanted to run Mongrel. I was one of the first to sign onto Rimu Hosting, who originally set everything up.

Unfortunately I was also one of those who couldn’t install Ruby 1.8.4 / Mongrel / etc the preferred way for Debian Sarge as outlined here.

The backport way looked a little scary, and the ‘gotchas’ about having to install rubygems and zlib seemed too much to handle.

In the end I got it all done, but not without some problems. Good thing I didn’t have anything to do today…

From Debian Sarge to Etch (aka Debian Testing)

Being completely ignorant about what could happen I bit the bullet and started the upgrade to Debian Etch. (Well not completely ignorant, I backed up all my mail, sites, and databases first :)

What could it be, what could it be? The promo site for our newest release just went live.

Click the logo to check it out.

Substruct, the e-commerce/cms/do it all rails engine has been updated.

http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct

Thanks to my friends in #substruct on FreeNode IRC we fixed the mysterious installation issues some people have been having. If you have been having problems installing check out the new download/install instructions on the wiki.

http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct/wiki/GettingTheCode http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct/wiki/InstallingSubstruct

Version 0.8

Fixed:

• Made sure questions require title.
  • This makes sure you can actually click on all questions from the UI (whoops!)

• DB setup was flawed, see migrations note.

  Migrations Note

  Loading db from the schema.rb file was seriously fucked, causing problems with duplicate columns and other nonsense.

  I've relabeled the migrations, adding the initial DB state as 001. Every other migration has been bumped up 1 version.

  Upgraders might have to change your engineschemainfo table....just an alert.

New pages for eDeals.com and AMS have been added to our portfolio.

Apologies for the downtime. The Sublog is back in business.

We’ve been hard at work on a new Rails site for eDeals.com. Expect a writeup soon with information about how we go about processing over 2 gigs of external data daily with Ruby.

PS: Is anyone excited that us poor GSM users finally get a new Treo? My 600 collects more scratches every day. Oh yeah, and the new Google Maps program for Treos isn’t too shabby either.

It’s finally here….

I’m talking about the Substruct open source Ruby on Rails e-commerce platform.

Substruct is the foundation for your web project

• A cleanly designed, simple platform for you to run your site
• The first and only Ruby on Rails open source e-commerce project.

  READ MORE

Support

Please don’t email us using our contact form for support of SubModal. I’ve created a Google Group for SubModal. All your questions should be answered there.

Now on with the show…

I develop a lot of DHTML technology that’s pretty cool. Unfortunately I never really have time to document and share it with the world.

In my former professional life I created DHTML libraries for other developers working with the Kenamea messaging platform.

Running this blog has inspired me to make some of my code available to the public, so today I present you with a way to generate cross browser modal dialogs. I call my technique the subModal.

The subModal in action