Here's an init script I just wrote for nginx on my fedora 8 box. It should be easy enough to modify for your own systems. #!/bin/sh# Start/Stop nginx - Fedora Core 8# Created 4/15/08 by bryan thompson - http://www.skippidydoo.comPATH= "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin: /usr/local/mysql/bin:/opt/local/bin"export PATHnginx=/usr/sbin/nginxnginx_pid=/var/run/nginx.pidcase "$1" in start) echo "Starting nginx " if [ -f $nginx... (more)

Here's how I got all of this running last night. The install went much more smoothly on an intel mac, but I still haven't been able to get it to play together (specifically the do_mysql gem) on ppc. Anyway, I'm sure there are better ways to configure nginx, but this was my first attempt.Starting with a clean FC8 Install, I:sudo yum install nginx git ruby ruby-devel ruby-libs irb ruby-mysql rubygems gcc-c++ mysql-develsudo gem install --remote rakesudo gem install rspec erubis json_pure zentest... (more)

This was entirely my fault and just a dumb programming mistake on my part, BUT it opened my eyes to a few weird things to look for while debugging. Short version: 1. Look for stuck/dead mongrels 2. check log sizes 3. check for stuck processes that are interfering with mongrels (lsof -i -n -P | less).At 5:20, I got an email from one of our web girls saying that the sites were starting to act flakey. After browsing through the sites a bit, I noticed what she was talking about. Some pages loaded... (more)

I was cruising around this morning and saw some guy's convoluted way of making a retro sunburst effect, so I'm posting this method, which is a zillion times easier. 1. Draw a tall rectangle and use the subselect tool to delete a point. 2. Add some guides to the far ends of the shape so you can figure out where the center is. Add a center guide to whatever coordinate you calculate your center to be. 3. I like to check myself by looking at the top and drawing a square on either side. If the ... (more)

I've been following some blogs regarding Merb and finally decided to give it a try. I've been a Rails guy for awhile, but it sounds like a lot of the effort I've had to go through on my own to optimize our sites has already been handled by the core of Merb. Our rails sites have hundreds of thousand of visits per month, which is pretty respectable for any site, especially for Radio stations in rural areas. A lot of Rails sites fail as soon as they get popular because they have focused on the s... (more)

I ran into a fun little situation today when I started converting my TinyMCE wysiwyg fields over to OpenWYSIWYG.  In one of my projects, I use a lot of ajax that can load wysiwyg fields.  I can't really explain in too much detail how my structure works, but if you've used ajax and wysiwyg before, you've no doubt come across the annoying overlap bug.  I've tried everything... using z-index to push the editors above everything else, pushing everything else way below, etc., but none ... (more)

There are a lot of photo carousel types of scripts out there, but none of them fit with what I was trying to do in one of my other projects, so I wrote this one from scratch. It uses mootools and slimbox in this example, however, I moved it directly into a project using lightbox and it worked without any modifications there as well. If you use this, you'll likely need to adjust the path of the "on" and "off" indicator graphics, but you shouldn't have to do much else. I tes... (more)

In my quest to make facebook even halfway usable again, I wrote the de-crapifier, which uses a javascript to find and hide all application boxes from your friends' profiles. This is a second script, which will remove application boxes from your home news feed. So if your dumb friend fights a pirate, you don't have to hear about it, and when somerandomgirl adds fifty-thousand Valentine's Day apps, it doesn't pollute your news feed.Update (additional features):script now hides advertisements fro... (more)

My last post started my quest to find something that would allow me to use javascript or any other language to modify a website before it got to my screen. I've had it rolling around in my head for awhile and stumbled across the exact thing I needed yesterday. This article came through my RSS reader, so I dug in to see how it drains href links from websites. It is actually pretty simple. You install the Greasemonkey firefox plugin, then install simple javascripts. Using some regular express... (more)

I don't know about you, but I want a whole lot more control over the sites I visit than I currently have. My facebook de-crap-ifier is the first step, but I want more. I want to be able to write plugins for specific sites that will be able to either hide or move content depending on what I care about. The primary example of this is the facebook news feed. I don't want to see sponsored crap, invites, notices about stupid shit, etc. If I could write a script that would be able to look at the ... (more)