More Freedom with GNU Stow

In honour of our friends down South celebrating their independence, let’s look at installing a local version of ruby onto a POSIX machine without requiring wrappers like rvm or rbenv. We want to be free to install things where we want, when we want, and how we want. Now that’s true freedom. Install GNU Stow Okay, you are going to need to install stow system wide for this step. This requires administrative permissions. I promise it’s the only thing. ...

July 4, 2014 · 3 min · 525 words · Scott Brown

Quickly Validating a Load-Balanced Website Architecture

I am in the process of consolidating a number of websites that I use into a smaller set of servers. This is partly being done to reduce costs as well as support less resources, but it also provides me with a chance to try out new things. In particular, I wanted to test out a load balanced architecture that will work within any VPS environment. Before I begin provisioning “real” servers and having companies bill me, I wanted to test that my ideal architecture works. I’m using the word “real” here to denote servers that will be public-facing and acting in a production-like capacity, as well as incurring billing charges. ...

February 2, 2014 · 7 min · 1310 words · Scott Brown

Adding Font Awesome to your project manually instead of via a gem

Font Awesome is truly a work of art. Those guys should be charging for this product, but I am grateful that they are not. Today was the day that I finally got fed up using the font-awesome-rails gem. On Rails 3 it was excellent and it was just a bundle install away, but with Rails 4 it just stopped working. Others have had issues with it and their response was that it was a sass-rails problem, and not theirs. Every time I used their gem with a Rails 4 project I would manually patch their gem to make it a proper SCSS file font-awesome.css.scss instead of using the old style font-awesome.css.erb that they use. However, whenever they release a new version of their gem mine stopped working until I patched it again. ...

August 6, 2013 · 2 min · 335 words · Scott Brown