Creating a subscription based website with Rails can seem daunting at first, but with the help of Recurly and Devise you can be up and running in no time.

Recurly.js does most of its work in the user’s browser, dynamically building a form that handles the transaction.

Note: This tutorial assumes you’ve already setup Devise for authenticating your User model.

Step 1 – Setup Your Recurly Account

Go to https://app.recurly.com/signup and sign up for the Recurly service.

Step 2 – Create a Subscription Plan

Once you’ve signed up for Recurly you’ll be presented with a button to “Create a Subscription Plan”. Click that or if you are already in your account click on “Subscription Plans” under the “Configuration” section of the left navigation. Then in the top right click “New Subscription Plan”.

After years of using Wordpress as my blogging platform I’ve decided to move to Octopress. While there was not necessarily anything wrong with using Wordpress for my blog, I think it was time to move on. Octopress is a blogging framework that is built around the Jekyll.rb project that generates static html sites.

Here’s why I switched:

• It’s Ruby! – Since I spent most of my time coding in Ruby it only made sense to move to a Ruby based blogging platform.
• Focus On Content – I found on my old Wordpress blog, I spent a lot of time configuring my theme and worrying about all the other pages of the site. I decided to concentrate on blog posts. The new setup has the content at the forefront.
• Free Hosting – Octopress is built on top of Jekyll.rb which powers Github Pages. Github Pages hosting is free. Can’t beat that.
• Easy Publishing – Creating and publishing a blog post is as easy as creating a Markdown file, writing my content and then simply running rake deploy
• Site Speed – Octopress sites are just static html. No databases to load. Much faster.
• No More DB Backups – Since I’m deploying the site with Github Pages, I don’t need to worry about backing up the content in the database. The entire thing is in version control with Git.
• Awesome Tech – I get to use SASS and Markdown.
• Easy Comments – Setting up commenting was as easy as adding my Disqus short name to the config.yml file.
• Quick Code Snippets – Octopress includes a code block plugin that includes language specific syntax highlighting.

My hope is that with all of this combined, I’ll write more. I really do enjoy writing about tech topics as I think it helps me solidify my knowledge and hopefully others will find the content useful.

Yes, renaming a Rails application isn’t something that you’ll do often. But when you do have to do it, you’ll quickly realize that it’s not as easy as just changing the name in a file or two. Your application name is spread out through a few dozen files including environment configs, initializers, routes and our application.rb file.

Luckily you don’t have to remember which files to change. Morshed Alam created a gem (appropriately named Rename) that handles the grunt work for you. Rename goes through your app and performs a gsub where appropriate.

To Rename Your Application

Add this line to your Gemfile:

1

gem "rename"

Every year more and more tools come out in the technology space. In 2012, I’ve adopted a ton of new tools into my web development workflow. Here’s a list of all of my tools, with the new ones in bold.

Hardware

Now that I’m working more and more away from home my main development machine has become a 15 “ Macbook Pro. It’s a 2GHz Intel Core i7 with 8Gb of RAM. When I do work from home I prefer to work on 27” iMac. I love the screen real estate and often wish I could bring it with me to the coffee shops I’m usually in.

I’m not big on using peripherals other than the standard keyboard and mouse. I use several external harddrives to store my music, videos and backups.

2012 has been a transformative year for my career. Back in May I heard about a new software training program called the Nashville Software School. It’s a new innovative training program that teaches students the fundamentals of web application technologies in via classroom lectures, exercises, mentors and apprenticeship. I got involved with the program by being a teacher for the front-end part of the school. I was a student in the second half which taught us the fundamentals of web application development with Ruby on Rails and all of the associated technologies. After going through the program, I’d like to share my tips on how to learn Ruby and Rails. There is more that one way to learn but here’s what worked for me.