Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

Hot on the heals of the Ruby on Rails 2.0 & 1.2.4 announcement the Rails team have released Rails version 1.2.4. At Media72 Hosting we always keep bang up to date with our Rails software so that you guys always have the option of using the latest release. Customers now have the option, on most servers, of using Rails 1.2.4, 1.2.3, 1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6, or 1.1.3, along with our large number of installed gems.

Ever wanted to be able to publish your events calendars online using Apples iCal but don't want to subscribe to Apples .mac service? With Media72 Hosting you can publish calendars from iCal, and any other application that supports publishing via webdav, just like you can using .mac. Read on for instructions... Firstly you will need to login to your Media72 Hosting control panel, if you don't already have an account why not take a look at our range of hosting offerings. Once logged in click on the "Web Disk" icon in the "Files" section, here you will create a web disk user and select a folder the user can connect to.

1. Enter a login name, this can be anything you want. We will enter the name "chris" for this tutorial
2. Choose the domain name from the drop down after the @ symbol. Our domain is media72.co.uk
3. Choose a password, again this can be anything you want. We will enter "chris474" for this tutorial
4. The Directory will be automatically completed for you, if you want to change this so something different go ahead. Remember that anything inside a public, web accessible, folder will be visible to anyone unless you password protect it. Also make sure that the directory you enter here actually exists or you will get an error when you try to connect, you can create if if necessary. We will enter public_html/chris for this tutorial
5. Click "Create"
6. Click the "Go Back" link

You are now ready to tell iCal to publish your calendar. Open iCal, or the application you want to publish from.

1. Select the calendar you want to publish and choose Calendar > Publish... from the menu
2. Choose a name for your calendar. We will use "Birthdays" for this tutorial
3. Select "a Private Server" from the Publish on: menu
4. In the base URL you will need to enter your domain name followed by the port 2077, in our case this would be http://media72.co.uk:2077
5. Enter the login you created earlier, in our case chris@media72.co.uk
6. Enter the password you chose earlier
7. Select any options you want to use the click "Publish"

You will now see a dialogue box informing you the calendar has been published with the option to with "Send Mail" or "OK", if you use the send mail feature you will need to edit the url of your calendar before you send it as iCal will not have the correct public url. The url of your newly created shared calendar will be your domain name plus the public part if the directory you entered when setting up your web disk user, along with the name of your calendar. In our case this will be webcal://media72.co.uk/chris/Birthdays.ics you can send this link to anyone you want to share your calendar with. If you would like to publish your calendar using a secure web disk connection instead of using your own domain for the base URL in step 4 enter your server name and change the port to 2078, e.g. https://server.media72.co.uk:2078, all communications to the web disk will now be encrypted. We hope you find this article useful, if you would like articles on other features please let us know.

We have now completed upgrading all of our servers to cPanel 11. Aside from a few small teething problems the upgrade has gone smoothly. So, what does this upgrade mean for you the customer? There are a large number of upgrades and updates that will make things a lot easier, especially for Ruby on Rails account customers.

Security and Speed

Firstly some of the more boring features, cPanel 11 includes some nice security improvements that will help to keep everyones sites secure and running smoothly. The control panel interface has been speed up, so you will notice much faster load times. One of the biggest changes you will notice is the new interface, it has a better, more usable design. A lot of time has been spent on contextual help that will guide you through using the many features.

Improved Coding Support

For the coders there are also many improvements, you can now install your own ruby gems into your user space without the need to contact support! PHP users are not left out either with the ability to install PEAR packages right inside the control panel. And thats not it, PERL Modules can also be installed in the same manor.

More Manageable Domains

Another feature Ruby on Rails developers will be especially pleased about is the ability to choose the document root for your add-on and sub domains, this means you can point your domain directly to your rails public folder without the need to contact support or mess around with symbolic links.

Easy Custom Branding

The final feature I am going to talk about here is branding, you are now able to fully brand your control panel. You can change any image in the control panel to your own designs, as well as edit the CSS allowing you to fully customise your control panel within minutes.

Coming Up

Over the next few weeks we are going to talk about some of the new features in more depth and how to used them. If you are not already a Media72 customer you are missing out, why not try one of our Ruby on Rails or shared hosting packages to see the difference a Media72 hosting account could make for you?

Capistrano 2.0 Preview 1 has been announced on the Riding Rails weblog, along with the release of Capistrano 2.0 is a new website called capify which is being updated as we speak.

There is an interesting list of new features including namespaces which will solve name conflicts when using multiple third-party task libraries, deployment strategies which will give you more choice over how you deploy, and a capify script that will ship with capistrano to help get you started.

One thing to note is that Capistrano 2.0 is not fully backwards compatible with 1.x so some alterations to your recipes may be needed. Thankfully there is an upgrade page dedicated to explaining how to upgrade from 1.x to 2.0 which should make the upgrade process go far more smoothly.

We will post more information as it becomes available as well as information on when we will upgrade our servers with a release version of Capistrano 2.0

We have updated all servers with the latest version of ClamAV, this software is used by our Mail Guard system. The release is mostly a security update so no new features this time I'm afraid.

Another release of rails this week. We have upgraded all servers to Rails version 1.2.3, to take advantage of the new version in your existing applications edit your environment.rb file and edit the rails version line to read: RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.2.3'

A minor update to Ruby on Rails has been released, version 1.2.2 was released on Tuesday, see David's post for details. We are pleased to announce we have upgraded all servers to Ruby on Rails version 1.2.2.

Late last week the long awaited Ruby on Rails 1.2 was released including a whole host of new features. David's blog post talks about the new release.

And the best part? We hate to keep our customers waiting, so, we have already installed Ruby on Rails 1.2 on all of our servers and its available for use today. Just days after its release you will be able to use the new features on your Media72 hosting account.

A word of warning! Ruby on Rails 1.2 is a brand new major release and as such may still contain bugs. You should take this into consideration before deploying a 1.2 rails application. Also, if you are upgrading an application make sure to read the change notes for details on what's changed and possible incompatibilities.