Peppy Heppy

In one of my last posts I showed how I was able to create completely custom urls for SEO, but there is an issue that sometimes comes up when creating custom urls or when migrating urls, etc.

Here is a simple way to ensure that urls that are being requested are valid. Google and Yahoo! (and others) crawl your sites links and can on occasion come across an incorrect ink from someone else’s site that may be old or mistyped. There are some stiff penalties associated with having two different urls pointing to the same page. There may also be a need to retire certain urls or to change the way they are formated.

Here is an example, the URL:

http://domain.com/d-123456-mountain_viewering

Should be redirected to:

http://domain.com/d-123456-mountain_view

Here is the simple solution:

I created a module that looked like the following in the lib directory and included it into the ActionController class.

include ActiveRecord

module MY
  module URL

    def page_code_object_map
      { 
        'd' => Destination, 'p' => Photo
      }
    end

    def execute_url_post_process
      canonicalize if params[:canonicalize]
    end

    def canonicalize

      whole_url   = request.request_uri().split('?')[0].split('#')[0]
      url_pieces  = current_url.split('-')
      page_type   = url_pieces[0].gsub(/\//, '')
      type_id     = url_pieces[1]

      begin
        object = page_code_object_map[page_type].find(type_id)
        canonical_url = send "custom_#{page_type}_path", object, params
      rescue RecordNotFound => e
        render :file => File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', '404.html'), :status => 404
        return
      end

      if canonical_url and canonical_url != whole_url
        headers['Status'] = '301 Moved Permanently'
        redirect_to("#{http_base}#{canonical_url}", :status => 301)
      end

    end

  end
end

ActionController::Base.send :include, MY::URL
ActionView::Base.send :include, MY::URL

In the route below, notice that I am passing a parameter named :canonicalize with the value of true. This parameter is passed through to the controller as a request parameter and can be accessed in the params hash.

map.d '/d-:destination_global_id-:name*other_params', :controller => 'destinations', :action => 'show', :canonicalize => true, :destination_global_id => /\d{1,20}/, :name => /[^-]+/

How does this all work you say? Simple. In your application controller (controllers/application.rb) you need to include something like this:

before_filter :execute_url_post_process

This will start the checking process by calling the execute_url_post_process() method defined above in my module. If the route that matches passes the :cononicalize parameter, the conanicalize() method will get the current url and certain important pieces. Then depending on the object that is mapped to the page code (d) it will reconstruct the url of the destination object that should match the existing url. If it matches then were golden, if it doesn’t then we redirect to the new/correct url ensuring that we do not loose page rank or be counted as spam (duplicate content).

There are many things that you can do within this code. Some of them include managing authorization, hiding pages, etc.

I hope you enjoyed this tip. If you have any suggestions, please post them, I am sure some genius will have something to add. :)

I needed to build urls that were packed with keywords for SEO. I needed to make sure that the url more fully described the contents of the page.

This default rails url does not cut it.

/destinations/12345

This does cut it.

/d-12345-mountain_view

So here is the hack that I did to get the desired affect. (Suggestions or insults on my approach are welcomed!)

First, I added this code into a plugin that I was using for our custom routes stuff. You can probably add this to the environment.rb file or better yet to a a file within lib and just make sure that you require the file from within environment.rb. I really needed to add the ’-’ as a delimiter.

This is step is important because by default rails uses slashes (/) as a dilimeter for parts of the url, but by adding a dash (-) to the array things work the way they should.

module ActionController
  module Routing
    SEPARATORS = %w( / ; . , ? -)  
  end
end

Then I added a named route (config/routes.rb) that looked something like this:

map.d '/d-:destination_global_id-:name*other_params', :controller => 'destinations', :action => 'show', :canonicalize => true, :destination_global_id => /\d{1,20}/, :name => /[^-]+/

Now we can create helper methods that take all of these wonderful parameters.

def custom_d_path(destination, params={})
  d_path(
    destination.global_id, 
    string_for_url(destination.name)
  ) + (params.size > 0 ? create_other_parameters(params) : "")
end                                                

The method string_for_url() just replaced spaces with underscored and removed illegal characters.

The create_other_parameters() appended parameters in a subtle way that ensured that Google and Yahoo! wouldn’t get prejudice about dynamic pages with parameters. (This is another topic for another time.)

In short, now we can simply call custom_d_path(destination) from any view (or controller if we included the helper in both ActionView and ActionController classes).

I realize that there may be a better way to do this to make it simpler to code, but this is a simple example of a way to solve this problem.

Now for a couple of caveats:

1. For those who have OCRD (obsesive compulsive REST disorder) the urls may not suite your style. I use them for the read only pages of a site.
2. You may not need to go to this extreme to keyword pack your urls… there are many other approaches that may be more robust and easier to implement.

Hopefully this example helps someone. :)

Recently I have been configuring Mongrel and Capistrano for a few apps that I have been working on. I use FastCGI on shared hosts, but if I have a bit more control on a VPS or a dedicated server I prefer to use Mongrel since it is easier to install and configure and it is also more stable. Here is what I do to get a Mongrel cluster up and running using Capistrano and the extension that Jamis Buck also wrote named Multistage.

Make sure you have ruby, rails, capistrano, capistrano-ext, mongrel, palmtree and mongrel_cluster gems installed on your system.

To generate your cluster files you can run the following commands with your specific details of course. ;)

~ $ cd rails_app
~/rails_app $ mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e development -c "/home/www/apps/web2.0app.com" -p 8000 -N 4 -C config/mongrel_development.yaml
~/rails_app $ mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e staging -c "/home/www/apps/web2.0app.com" -p 8010 -N 4 -C config/mongrel_staging.yaml
~/rails_app $ mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e production -c "/home/www/apps/web2.0app.com" -p 8020 -N 4 -C config/mongrel_production.yaml

Now all you need to do is configure Capistrano config/deploy.rb file to make use of these cluster files and the Multistage extension for Capistrano. If you don't how to setup Multistage, you can do a search for it or read my other post in it.

require 'palmtree/recipes/mongrel_cluster'
set :stages, %w(staging production development)
set :default_stage, "development"
require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'
...
set(:mongrel_conf) { "#{current_path}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml" }
...
deploy.task :after_update_code, :roles => [:web] do
  desc "Copying the right mongrel cluster config for the current stage environment."
  run "cp -f #{release_path}/config/mongrel_#{stage}.yml #{release_path}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml"
end

In order for the correct mongrel cluster to start you will need to have a recipe in your deploy that ensures that the correct cluster file is renamed to the config/mongrel_cluster.yml and then it is used by Capistranos' mongrel:cluster:restart task.

Admittedly there are many more things that need to be done before and after this little tip, but I thought that this may help someone who may need to bridge their understanding of how easy it is to solve the Mongrel cluster on different stages problem.

A few months ago I was working on a project that required me to setup credit card processing. My client already had a merchant account using the Verifi gateway and instead of talking my client into using a different gateway or doing something from scratch, i figured i would just add support for Verifi for the Active Merchant Rails plug-in and then give back the code to the plug-in project. So if you are using the Verifi payment gateway you have a great rails plug-in with support for it.

Lets be open about this, Rich McIver sent me an email informing me that he had written an article on "74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials." My immediate thought was "what? who? why?" but then I went to the article and after reading through it I found myself interested in the articles that he had put together. Good job Rich for the great article and for the 74 handpicked resources -- even if the number 74 is one article shy of 75. Okay, who is going to write the 75th resource now?

Oh, yeah! before I forget, here is the link to Richs article.

74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials

With all of the resources out there on Rails, its nice to have a quality list.

I have been attending the Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup since the first meeting a year ago this next May (or so.) I am surprised at the number of people that show up and their purpose in coming. it started out with just a few computer geeks who love Ruby and Rails and now I think half of the attendees tonight were VCs, companies looking for Rails engineers, or people looking for partners for their next big idea for a web app.

I think its great but I have to admit it must be a sign of the times.

Ruby on Rails is here to stay and even companies like Spock (spock.com) are building large apps with it with 9M$ in VC.

now all I have to do is figure out a way to use Rails more since I don’t get the pleasure currently at my day job. :)

On November 9th I attended the Ruby on Rail Camp unconference that was help at the IBM research labs on San Jose. Not only was it fun to attend but great to see so many rails enthusiasts. I attended various unconference style workshops that covered everything from MemCacheD to Test-driven development. The unconference started out with a discussion on Rubys' (and Rail) performance and asked the question: Is Ruby on Rails ready for business? I was impressed with how level headed everyone seemed to be -- no one was so blind to Ruby on Rails weaknesses (performance) that the conversation became irrational. I concluded personally that it was ready for business but that there is a lot of room for performance improvements and that Rails, although really powerful and agile, is not the best tool for every project. Ruby on Rails, like so many other language frameworks is good at certain types of projects in certain types of teams. Personally I like the creating and being apart of the businesses, projects, and teams that would see Ruby on Rails as the most agile and versatile development framework. Rails Camp was a blast! I look forward to attending the next one.

I am working on a little app (link coming soon) with a friend of mine in an effort to practice my rails and now Rmagick skills since my day job doesn't allow me the opportunity.

One of the things that I am building is an logo generator so I need to have an image manipulator/generator of some sort. I have used ImageMagick on many projects in the past so I looked forward to spitting out the classy logos uswing Rmagick.

Like most open-souce installs on OSX and Linux there were some issues that came up along the way.

I first ran the following command on my OSX terminal but got a couple of errors.

# sudo gem install RMagick
...
Can't find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program.
...

I fixed this error by installing the imagemagick-dev version as opposed to imagemagick.

Then when I tried it again I received this error:

...
Can't install RMagick. Can't find libMagick or one of the dependent libraries
...

I resolved this error by searching google and finding this thread so I told fink (one of my osx package managers) that I wanted it to build imagemagick from source with the following command:

# fink --no-use-binary-dist install imagemagick-dev

After I rebuilt ImageMagick form source and inclused all of the dependent libraries i was able to successfully run the following command with no problems:

# sudo gem install RMagick

It worked! Yeah!

Now I will get back to the Rmagick docs. :)