Into the Red

This is a very well put together explanation of the financial meltdown…

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I lost my job a few months ago.

Instead of getting a new job, I sold my car to feed the family and pay the bills, and started hacking away on what I hope will be my new future: http://bookwhen.com

It’s live, but not quite fully functional yet. I raced to launch so I can get some real feedback (as explained in a previous post).

So, before I start promoting it all over the place, I’d like to appeal for volunteers. Anyone is welcome. Whoever’s up for it, email me and I’ll give you a Pro account for free. Please please help, and if it’s not for you then tell anyone you might know who could use it.

Thanks.

I’ve recently moved from nginx with mongrels to phusion passenger on apache.

I like to drop the www subdomain on my sites when I can, but the passenger chaps recommend that you don’t use mod_rewrite with mod_rails (aka mod_rack or even mod_ruby).

So how’s it to be done?

The simple solution is to do the re-write in rails. I found this snippet which does the trick (thanks to RSL):

http://gist.github.com/67043

def trim_www
  if request.subdomains.first == "www"
    if request.subdomains == ["www"]
      redirect_to "#{request.protocol}#{request.domain}#{request.port_string}#{request.path}"
    else
      subdomains = request.subdomains.shift.join(".")
      subdomains << "." unless subdomains.blank?
      redirect_to "#{request.protocol}#{subdomains}#{request.domain}#{request.port_string}#{request.path}"
    end
  end
end