Remy is sort of launched. A very tiny closed beta is happening as I write. Its been about a week now, and of course I have been obsessing over the traffic hitting the production.log. I’ve got a constant tail -f going on my desktop machine, and I get so excited when I see someone new checking things out. Just watching the production.log is giving me great insight into the usability of the product. I can see where people are clicking, and if they are hesitating, if they are not sure about where they are at that moment, or where to go next. I’ve made a few tweaks here and there just by watching the traffic in this log, so it has been a huge help and a lot of fun! What happens when I am away from my desk though? Perhaps I am hanging at my favorite coffee house, Zume’s, where I pretty much have established a secondary office. Well, in that case, I’ve got my trusty macbook, and iTerm to handle my tail -f. But what if I am on the go, gallivanting around town? This could be a big problem. I need to be able to see my traffic at all times or my head will explode. Enter … a new iPhone App. Searched and downloaded from the App Store, check out TouchTerm. A nifty little SSH client where I can tail -f to my hearts desire … and boy do I!! Its got a nice preference pane, to tweak colors and overall look and feel. Its even got up arrows, so you can simply scroll through your past commands. Best part is, I get to continue to see my sites traffic in real time, from anywhere I am at that particular moment. Brilliant! At a measly $2.99, its the best thing I’ve ever bought for that price … except for maybe Zume’s coffee.
I have been busy!! Not just busy …. swamped busy!! The kind of busy when you work from home, and your husband expects to come home to a clean house, and a nice meal, and instead he gets you still greasy, in your pajamas, locked away in the corner room, hyped up on caffeine, with piles of hot messes surrounding you. Its not pretty, nor healthy. I am happy to say I am moving out of the woods and reentering the masses!
Its been a couple of months now, and I have made a ton of progress on Remy. Thinking about getting a beta launched soon. A few days ago my IT guy convinced me I needed to deploy in a different server environment. The one I have been using for development has become more and more troublesome as they are adding more and more users to it. The server crashed twice this week, and the hosting company said they had to reboot the machine due to load. Not my app’s load … just the sheer number of people they have hosted on this server. Not going to work for me. Instead my IT guy did some research and we are trying a new environment called Go Grid. I’ll let him blog about the details, mostly because it is not my area of expertise (see my entry "not a computer girl"). Anyway, it has been quite the process to get everything moved over to the new server environment. One major issue we hit was the installation of all the right gems. In the old environment, it was a hosting company that only dealt with Rails apps, so they had hundreds of gems installed for everyone to use. Starting from a scratch environment, we had to go through and figure out which ones I needed … mostly via trial and error. The problem that took the most time was a strange issue I was hitting with the file_column plugin. After the deployment on the new server, I could only get gif files to upload. If I put in a jpeg or a png, it would error out with "Invalid Image". I searched and searched everywhere on the internet and found maybe 2 other people having this problem … with no way to fix it. What a pain!!! Finally we tracked it down, and I am logging it here for the next person that comes along and is frustrated by it. It turns out, we needed to install some extra libraries used by ImageMagick, specifically libjpeg-devel and PNG. Here is a great step by step write up about installing RMagick for use with the file_column plugin.
Now that we are *finally* all moved over to the new server environment, my IT guy is putting the last few things in place for clustering and load balancing. It should be a pretty solid, pretty fast, and generally pretty set up!!! All of this in preparation for the first beta release. Phew … this has been the fastest two months. Ever.