Looking around for a Rails based CMS because I am sick of working in PHP (Drupal). RefineryCMS looks like the best of the bunch.

Here are some notes from my installation of it on my Dreamhost account:

1) ssh to your host

2) a simple ‘gem install refinerycms’ just hung & I didn’t feel like waiting around so a quick Google search came up with this answer:

In your tmp directory, create a temporary Gemfile with the following contents:

then run ‘bundle’

The bundle command failed for me, even though ‘gem list’ showed it was installed. So I ran ‘gem install bundle –no-rdoc –no-ri’ which installed a newer version & also setup the binary so I could successfully execute ‘bundle’.

3) Next thing to do is delete the temporary Gemfile and cd to your home directory.

4) From your home directory, execute the following (using your desired [sub]domain name):

5) Then, create a new subdomain in Dreamhost via http://panel.dreamhost.com (same as above, I called mine cms.olore.net), click the checkbox for ‘Passenger (Ruby/Python apps only):’ and let it add ‘public’ to the end of your web directory – this will point to the public directory of the rails app that you just created.

Give Dreamhost a minute or two, then hit your site with a browser. You should see the initial screen for RefineryCMS asking you to create a new user.

Possible problems … with solutions!

a) When first accessing your site, you may get a Passenger error about rack versions. You may need to modify Gemfile.lock to use rack 1.2.1. If you make this change, simply ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’ to tell Passenger to restart, then hit the URL in the browser again.

b) When first accessing your home page you may get a 500 error. I resolved this by running ‘RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate’ followed by ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’

Good luck!

Tags: cms, dreamhost, rails, refinerycms

I was inspired by this story in the Anchorage Daily News about a woman that started @AKBadDrivers “who started describing bad drivers on her personal Twitter feed from her spot in the passenger seat as she commuted in from Wasilla.” The simple brilliance of this usage of Twitter really struck me.

With tweets like

• silver jeep, FLB 272. thanks for cutting me off not once but TWICE when you were going straight in turn only lanes prick.
• To the girl in the Green Explorer outside Muldoon Fred Meyers this afternoon: Sorry my U-turn scared you. My bad
• white Nissan pu FEL 365 hang up ur cell phone pay attention 2 ur driving. ur lane ended & you nearly hit me merging 2 mine.

… I wanted a piece of that action!

So I started @NJBadDrivers and @CTBadDrivers. Then I realized I better grab @NYBadDrivers to complete the tri-state trifecta. Imitation is the sincerest form, right ? After talking to my buddy who moved up to Alaska, he said that people really are crazy drivers up there, but come on, can they really be worse than New York, Connecticut or New Jersey drivers? (Admittedly, I’ve had licenses in all 3 states.)

I’m running with Christopher Finke‘s slick little python application called retweet on my Dreamhost account. If Chrstopher’s name sounds familiar (it should!) it’s cuz he’s the mastermind behind ScribeFire and the TwitterBar Firefox add-on. For those interested in running retweet on Dreamhost, be sure to use python2.5 as it already has the sqlite3 library configured. Once I figured that out, I cron’d it and it’s been working like a charm.

So how’s it work? All you need to do is send a message to one of the accounts via Twitter and it will get retweeted by the bot. Just say “@NJBadDrivers does anyone around here know how to function at a four way stop???” or “@NYBadDrivers srsly people, traffic circles are not that difficult”.

I wonder… is reserving Twitter names the new domain squatting? If so, would it be called twatting?

Tags: alaska, dreamhost, retweet, twitter, twitterbot