There are 2 solutions I could find used to solve this problem:

1. Use a cron job to access the application every couple of minutes to keep it in memory.

One of the ‘raw’ solutions used are setting up a cron job to automatically access the application every few minutes and therefore keep it in memory.

crontab -e

And use nano (or your favorite editor) to add this at the end of the cron jobs:

*/5 * * * * wget http://www.example.com > /dev/null

This issues a wget request every 5 minutes and trashes the response.

2. Setup passenger not to automatically kill the rails processes.

But, on the other hand, if you have access to the server’s configuration, a better approach is to modify a few of Passenger’s constants:

PassengerMaxPoolSize 30 (use 15 if you have a machine with 1GB, 30 if you have 2GB of RAM, etc.). This will enable more processes to be spawned if necessary.

PassengerPoolIdleTime 0 (using 0, application instances will not be shutdown unless it’s really necessary – when the available resources on the server are low)

On an Ubuntu machine, you would have to edit the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file by adding these two lines:

PassengerMaxPoolSize 30
PassengerPoolIdleTime 0

Restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And you should not have that slow boot problem anymore.

*3. Use nginx + thin

Since I had a ton of compatibility problems when developing under vanilla Windows (with Ruby1.9 and rails3, a lost of gems failed to work, etc.), I hope the Unix-path is much smoother.

Let’s see how we can get it going…

Step 1: Install cygwin

You will need in to select the following in addition to the the default selected configuration (italic = requirements for the Nokogiri gem):

• make
• gcc
• libiconv
• openssl
• ruby
• libiconv
• libxml2
• libxml2-devel
• libxslt
• libxslt-devel

Step 2: Use Console with Cygwin by default

Console was one of the tips I didn’t know about ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ ), it’s much nicer than the old ‘cmd’, and most of all you can set it up to start a cygwin console by default

Quote from http://garbageburrito.com/blog/entry/391/a-macesque-rails-development-environment-on-windows:

You’ll want to setup cygwin as a Console Tab. Just go into the settings and click “Add” under “Tabs”. Use the following as the “Shell”.

c:\cygwin\bin\bash --login -i

If you want it to automatically open cygwin when you start Console, just move it to the top of the Tabs list.

Just in case you encounter errors with

rvm install 1.8.7

Checkout this post about readline: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/packages/readline/.

rvm package install readline

Step 3a: Ruby 1.8.7

Ruby 1.8.7 is already installed in cygwin, so if you want to use this one, you’re ready to go.

Step 3b: If you want RVM

Follow the instructions from http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

Modify ~/.bash_profile by appending at the very end, after all path loads etc:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"  # This loads RVM into a shell session.

Install ruby with

rvm install 1.8.7

rvm install 1.9.2

Step 3c: Compile Latest Ruby (without RVM)

Download the Ruby 1.9 source from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ (downloaded the latest stable Ruby 1.9.2-p136 at the time of writing)

tar xvf ruby-1.2.2-p136.tar.gz

cd ruby-1.9.2-p136

./configure

(lasts ~5-10 minutes)

make -j 3

(use 3 if you have 2 cores, 5 if you have 4 cores, etc.)

make install

ruby -v

to confirm the new version

(find more in-depth instructions here: http://www.curphey.com/2010/05/installing-and-configuring-ruby-1-9-from-source-using-cygwin/)

Step 4: Avoid the default installation of ri and rdoc from ruby gems

To avoid the installing of documentation (as I usually check the online documentation):
create .gemrc file in your cygwin home directory (~) with the following contents:

gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc

Step 5: Install sqlite

Downloaded the latest sqlite tarball containing the amalgamation for SQLite 3 from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html.

tar xvf sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz

cd sqlite-autoconf-3070400

./configure

make -j 3

(use 3 if you have 2 cores, 5 if you have 4 cores, etc.)

make install

Step 6. Install Rails 3

gem install rails

Step 7. Create & start the first Rails3 app

rails new testapp

cd testapp

bundle install

(this will install sqlite3-ruby gem)

rails s

That’s it!

An odd fact was that get_search_link() returns something like /search/lorem+ipsum. So if you’re using a theme that creates a link to the search results page you’ll receive a different URL compared to the one that you receive when performing an actual search (two pages at different URLs showing the exact same content is no good).

Therefore I created a small snippet that fixes this when inserted in the functions.php file from your theme – making get_search_link() return the exact same URL that one would receive when performing a search.


function simple_search_link($link)
{
$link = str_replace('/search/','/?s=',$link);
$link = rtrim($link, '/');
return $link;
}
add_filter('search_link','simple_search_link');


I’ve used the str-replace to replace the /search/ with /?s=, and the rtrim function to strip the trailing /.
Now the exact same URL is used for both the get_search_link as actual searches.

This would also mean a better performance if you’re using caching.

A solution is to detect the availability of images, and if they are disabled to manually adjust the styling of the problematic elements.
Basically doing this:

Now to share how that was accomplished.

1. Uploaded 2 files:

• blank.gif to the root of the domain
• captcha-accessiblity-enhancer to the root of the domain (it’s better to store all your JS file in a designated folder, but that is irrelevant for demo purposes)

2. Embeded the JS (before the body closing tag – </body>)
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/captcha-accessiblity-enhancer.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

And that’s it. The people with disabled images will be able to properly use the reCaptcha now.

If you’re getting an odd behavior on your scripts in Internet Explorer, try adjusting their name (for example by adjusting their names with a unique prefix) just to make sure that there isn’t any element in the page you’re working on with the same ID as your variable name.

If you want to read a much elaborate explanation, go check out Rick Strahl’s post here: Internet Explorer Global Variable Blow ups, but the above should get you going in no time (and help you avoid some headaches).

Since WordPress 2.9 has enabled us to easily embed videos ( codex.wordpress.org/Embeds ), it also means we don’t have the ability to change the embed code (to add the wmode transparent for example), and that’s why we have to rely on applying a filter that does that for us.

Simply paste the following at the beginning of your theme’s functions.php (after <?php ), and the wmode attribute will be setup automatically:

function add_video_wmode_transparent($html, $url, $attr) {
   if (strpos($html, "<embed src=" ) !== false) {
    	return str_replace('</param><embed', '</param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed wmode="transparent" ', $html);
   } else {
        return $html;
   }
}
add_filter('embed_oembed_html', 'add_video_wmode_transparent', 10, 3);

Update

As Theo pointed out, the videos can come in in iframes instead of object elements. To make the videos transparent in those cases as well, here’s the updated snippet:

function add_video_wmode_transparent($html, $url, $attr) {

if ( strpos( $html, "<embed src=" ) !== false )
   { return str_replace('</param><embed', '</param><param name="wmode" value="opaque"></param><embed wmode="opaque" ', $html); }
elseif ( strpos ( $html, 'feature=oembed' ) !== false )
   { return str_replace( 'feature=oembed', 'feature=oembed&wmode=opaque', $html ); }
else
   { return $html; }
}
add_filter( 'embed_oembed_html', 'add_video_wmode_transparent', 10, 3);

A demo video embedded using built-in oEmbed:

http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/

Why bother using complicated alternatives… when you can do it in just one line?
$(‘.slider’).cycle({fx: ‘fade’});

Just got a Badminton Basic Kit from Head (cheers to Dia_Fantasy for recommending these to me)… and I played with them until I could hardly see the shuttles in the night

Bottom line: Go out and play !

You can read a really good article from ALA giving a nice insight with regards to what approach should you take in the early development phases towards avoiding various zooming problems: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fontresizing/

Most complex designs don’t allow so much flexibility such that you can make things really scalable via the CSS, so our most used option will probably be a touch of Javascript.
As on most of my projects jQuery is a standard, I chose to use a little jQuery plug-in that does the job of detecting the font-resize event really well:

http://wellstyled.com/en/javascript-onfontresize-jquery-plugin/

Once you caught the event you can do any kind of magic

What approaches did you take to solve such situations ?