Raymond Law

Dealistic was first deployed to Slicehost when we were testing it on staging. However, I only got the 256 slice and low memory is a big problem for Ruby and Mongrel. We’ve moved to Amazon EC2 when we launched. It is running rock solid and we don’t run out of memory again, at least for now :P

As a result of all these, I wrote two Capistrano recipes for deployment, for both Slicehost and EC2. We also use GitHub for version control. I think these deployment recipes may be helpful to others. So here they are:

• deploy.rb for Slicehost
• deploy.rb for EC2

We wrote some custom Capistrano tasks to copy over configuration files, symlink plugins, start/stop BackgrounDRb, and a custom maintenance page. But these things are optional. It should be simple to add/remove things as you see fit.

(I also posted about this plugin in the Intridea blog )

Badger (hosted at GitHub) is a simple Rails plugin that creates badges. A site often allows its users to upload a profile image. A profile image is just that, an image resized to fit in a predefined space to show up in the user’s profile.

With Badger, you can have something prettier – a badge that shows the user-uploaded image on top of another image that identifies the user as a part of the community. We have company badges, security badges, so why not web badges to have your users show off his/her affection for your site?

Badger works by accepting cropping parameters of the overlay image in a hash (x1, y1, width, height), which is used to crop the overlay image. It then resizes the cropped image to the size specified by composite_width and composite_height in badger.yml. Finally, it places the resized image on top of the background image at location specified by composite_x and composite_y in badger.yml. The resulting image is saved back to either the filesystem or Amazon S3, using attachment_fu.

Badger requires the attachment_fu plugin, ImageMagick, and MiniMagick. Also, the JavaScript Image Cropper UI can be used to obtain the cropping parameters from the users.

For example:

+ =

Here I overlay RUBY on top of JAVA to produce I LOVE RUBY.