Archive for June, 2005

In a moment of boredom I decided to see what themes are out there for WordPress. I think I’ve settled on the Northern Web Coders one. It’s pretty nice but needs some tweaking, the dead links at the top of the page for example. The theme also needs to be adjusted to handle <pre> blocks. I miss the old Moveable Type themes, or at least the ones that took up the entire width of the screen.

Fiddling with themes does mean mucking around with PHP pages and I’m in no hurry to learn it. Maybe it’s time to explore some Ruby blogging software since DreamHost fully supports Rails now.

DreamHost has unofficially started to support Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. There’s been a thread on their programming discussion board about this and someone from DH said FastCGI is now available but they haven’t made a formal announcement yet. Setting up things is pretty straightforward. In the DreamHost Control Panel select ‘Domains > Web’ and choose to edit ‘http’ on the domain you want to use Rails with. Then tick ‘FastCGI Support?’ and make you web directory point to the ‘public’ sub-directory in your Rails project directory.

The next step is to edit ‘.htaccess’ in ‘public’. Change RewriteBase to ‘/dispatch.fcgi’ and alter the last ReWrite rule so it also points to dispatch.fcgi. That’s it your Rails app should now run. If you were running off your own copy of Ruby (like I was) remember to change where your dispatch.fcgi finds Ruby (change the first line).

I also noticed that the value in ‘RAILS_ENV’ wasn’t getting picked up so I altered config/environment.rb to use the production, instead of the development environment by default.