Another idea prototyping for comic fans: Comics Crowd

I created an application to share fav comic book list: http://comics-crowd.heroku.com/

it is great if you can recommend good comic books to me (and to other people)

need your feedback to improve the website too ~

^___^

Cheers

Written in Ruby On Rails

Open Source at github: http://github.com/3dd13/comics-crowd

Deployed to heroku

Talks about Hong Kong IT Career at HKUST

Another Jekyll and Hyde presentation deployed to heroku:

http://it-career-in-hk-hkust-3dd13.heroku.com/

Using Jekyll, Hyde and Heroku for presentation slides

I was sharing architecture of a RU05 program and performance tuning we did on with Mongo.
Codeaholics Feb Meetup

The slides i showed was actually a web page moving like a powerpoint slides.
The source code to generate the slides is available in github.

here I draft out high level steps giving you some rough ideas of the work required to create such webpage. you can find all the detail steps in jekyll, jekyll_and_hyde and rack-jekyll github page.

install required gems and create project:

gem install jekyll
gem install jekyll_and_hyde
gem install rack-jekyll
jh new codeaholics_hk_feb_2011
cd codeaholics_hk_feb_2011

To prepare deployment for the future, generate the static pages into another folder instead of default _site directory. i used "pages" folder in my case:

in the .gems file, include rack-jekyll
follow the github pages to setup _config.yml and config.ru

You can start creating your powerpoint, and read it at localhost:4000

jekyll --server pages
jh generate frontpage
... // generate your static pages
... // keep your jekyll server running until you finish. i explain why below

When you want to deploy to heroku:

git init
git add .
git commit -m ""
heroku create codeaholics_hk_feb_2011
git push heroku master

One issue i saw when generating post was that. I edited my posts markdown files after I stopped the jekyll server, and later when i started it again, no more static pages generated automatically. I guess the service could no longer recognizes which files was edited. I could not resolve this problem. So, i have to create another project and copy over my markdown files to continue.

change Heroku timezone

I had one application hosted at Heroku. A bug was found that several date fields are incorrect. I thought it was something about date time formatting with strftime. but it turned out to be the timezone difference between my development machine and the Heroku instance. Time.now returns different values in these machines.

here is the command to update the Heroku timezone:

heroku config:set TZ=Asia/Hong_Kong

First time on Heroku

saw my colleagues using that for a while.

this is the first time i start using it from scratch.
http://greenhk.heroku.com

Besides the performance gain by this cloud hosting thing, the most surprising thing is the powerful toolset it comes with.

1)

Deployment is just a line of command

git push heroku master

then it will push your code to the git reportsitory, handle all the migrations and restart the rails application.

2)

It's like connecting to an application running on your local machine

Troubleshoot on the remote production server and tail the log is just a line of

heroku logs --tail

then it will send back the next block of log incremental changes.

and ... it is free !!

to me, i don't need big database thingy, so i can apply the free plan and just enjoy the performance and simplicity it provides !!