mghaught

Building Static Sites with Middleman on S3

In 2015, I converted haughtcodeworks.com to a static site built with Middleman and hosted on S3 and CloudFront. I was asked how I went about that so this gist documents what I did, as best as I can recall. It's been nearly two years since then so some of the gems and tools may have changed for the better.

You may wonder why I shifted to a static site given how dynamic web content is these days. I've known for years that static sites are ideal for certain kinds of content and after hearing about Middleman for the upteenth time, I decided that when it was time to refresh our website, I'd take a look.

As a Ruby programmer, I found that Middleman allowed me to work in the same fashion as I did in Rails yet generate static content. I could still use data or Ruby code to customize how I generated the site.

Cost was another benefit. My monthly hosting bill is $0.13, which includes CDN features via CloudFront. How can you argue with that price? There were a

mghaught

Keeping your Development Environment Current

Presented at the Boulder Ruby meetup

1. Learn to install your full stack from scratch

• Don't use any 'out of the box' auto install all the things scripts
• Even if your workplace/school provides a machine all ready to go, you still want to do this for your own growth and understanding

2. Know each component so you can update it

3. Don't be afraid to start from scratch and do it all over again. Practice!

mghaught

What is logging?

Taking output from a program and writing it to the end of a file (or other IO)

Why should you use this?

Easy way to track output from a running program, especially handy for long running processes like web servers

puts vs logger

mghaught

class Project
  include Ripple::Document
  
  property :name, String, :presence => true
  
  property :survey_text, String, :presence => true
  property :follow_up_text, String
  
  many :scores
  

mghaught

  state_machine :checkout_state, :initial => :address, :use_transactions => false do
    state :delivery
    state :payment
    state :confirm
    state :complete

    event :next do
      transition :from => 'address', :to => 'delivery'
      transition :from => 'delivery', :to => 'payment'
      transition :from => 'payment', :to => 'confirm'

mghaught

MartyMPBS-3:outcampaign.org marty$ heroku addons --app outcampaign
bundles:single
custom_domains:basic
exceptional:basic
newrelic:bronze
pgbackups:daily
shared-database:5mb
ssl:piggyback
MartyMPBS-3:outcampaign.org marty$ heroku plugins:install git://github.com/nzoschke/pgbackups-automate.git
pgbackups-automate installed

mghaught

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra/base'
require 'haml'


class NetPromoterScoreApp < Sinatra::Base
  
  before do
    headers "Content-Type" => "text/html; charset=utf-8"
  end

mghaught

Truncation performed on main DB:

 mysql2 - disable_referential_integrity - 1
>> mysql2 - active? true
  SQL (0.1ms)  SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0
>>   disabled referential integrity
  SQL (0.4ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.1ms)  SELECT DATABASE() as db
  SQL (0.7ms)  select table_name from information_schema.views where table_schema = 'tnation_forums_test'
>>     truncating categories

mghaught

DOH!!! error - undefined method `query_options' for nil:NilClass
 ["/Users/marty/Developer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@tnation/gems/activesupport-3.0.3/lib/active_support/whiny_nil.rb:48:in `method_missing'", "/Users/marty/Developer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@tnation/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql2_adapter.rb:310:in `execute'", "/Users/marty/Developer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@tnation/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/database_statements.rb:269:in `update_sql'", "/Users/marty/Developer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@tnation/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql2_adapter.rb:331:in `update_sql'", "/Users/marty/Developer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@tnation/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/database_statements.rb:49:in `update'", "/Users/marty/Developer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@tnation/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/query_cache.rb:16:in `update'", "/Users/

mghaught

2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[nginx]: GET /articles/571949-pakistanis-rally-in-support-of-blasphemy-law HTTP/1.1 | 207.46.13.51 | 3309 | http | 500
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[router]: Error H10 (App crashed) -> GET richarddawkins.net/comments/571657 dyno=none queue=0 wait=0ms service=0ms bytes=0
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[nginx]: GET /comments/571657 HTTP/1.1 | 207.46.204.184 | 3308 | http | 500
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[router]: Error H10 (App crashed) -> GET richarddawkins.net/comments/567962 dyno=none queue=0 wait=0ms service=0ms bytes=0
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[nginx]: GET /comments/567962 HTTP/1.0 | 207.46.13.51 | 3309 | http | 500
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[router]: Error H10 (App crashed) -> GET richarddawkins.net/comments/570195 dyno=none queue=0 wait=0ms service=0ms bytes=0
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[nginx]: GET /comments/570195 HTTP/1.1 | 207.46.204.184 | 3308 | http | 500
2011-01-05T14:55:54-08:00 heroku[nginx]: GET /images/bars/alt/right/news1.jpg?12942654