Using xip.io for Local and Staging Environments

One of the Rails apps I work on is at its core a multi-site content management system. I have the need to test locally and in a staging environment using production data. Using curl -H "Host: www.example.com only gets you so far, and when you need to test in a browser, that’s not going to cut it.

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Switching From RVM to rbenv on a Production Server

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Serving an iPhone website with nginx

I’ve been thinking for a while about the best way to automatically take iPhone and iPod touch users to an iPhone-enhanced version of a website when they first access it rather than requiring the users to know the iPhone-specific URL beforehand. This was the main requirement, but there were a few others. These are the problems I needed to solve:

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E-mail Address Obfuscation

If you’ve ever put your e-mail address on your site, you know how quickly spambots find it and start sending you great offers you can’t refuse.  I had this problem and needed to come up with a good solution before beginning to develop client sites.

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Catching up

2009 is less than a month away, and I’m already (read: finally) writing my first blog post.  I’ve written a blog engine (which runs ErikEbelingArt.com/blog) but never a simple post.  Go figure.

As a web developer, I have the pleasure of solving some interesting problems, from simple CSS tricks to complex server-side image processing.  Knowing the feeling of hitting a roadblock at 1:00am the night a client website is supposed to be launched and finding a solution on someone’s blog, I thought it was past time for me to contribute.  Plus, I want to get published before the Internet is full.

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