Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

This issues has now been resolved

Dear Customers,

It has come to our attention that the data centre hosting a number of our servers has had a major explosion. What follows is the notification from the data centre.

“…electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.”

“…Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by late on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.”

The majority of our servers are unaffected as they are housed in a different physical location, however, the following servers have been affected by the explosion:

bingo.media72.net
shipstern.media72.net

While the circumstances of this outage are completely beyond our control, we do apologise for the impact to our customers and thank you for your patience while the data centre staff work to restore power and service.

Please refer to our blog for updates on the situation.

Media72 Staff

To better keep our customers informed about what’s going on here at Media72 you can now keep track of news and developments via our twitter feed. We will be posting notifications of blog posts, knowledge base updates, service status and general developments here at Media72.

As part of our ongoing move to the media72.net domain we have now moved this blog to it’s new home at blog.media72.net. Please update your bookmarks. Any links pointing to the old url will be automatically redirected to the new site.

It’s great to see Apple supporting and promoting both Ruby and Rails. At their upcoming WWDC08 conference they have a Ruby on Rails Labs session on Wednesday morning and a RubyCocoa Labs session on Friday afternoon.

No help for us in the UK but nice to see all the same.

This plugin has been updated to include additional functionality.

We are very pleased to announce the javascript_auto_include plugin for ruby on rails written by our very own Jamie Dyer. This plugin automatically includes javascript code that is specific to a single view or controller which means you don’t have to pass anything to your template telling it which javascript files are needed for each page.

Working with unobtrusive javascript in Rails can be somewhat difficult. While Rails default javascript helpers are easy to use they produce javascript that is not unobtrusive.

When writing unobtrusive javascript in Rails it’s often necessary to include a javascript file that will be used by a single view or controller. This can become problematic, messy and very un-Rails like if not managed well.

With the Rails philosophy “convention over configuration” in mind I decided to create a plugin to automatically including javascript files that correspond to the view or controller name mirroring the view structure within the javascripts folder. The javascript_auto_include plugin is born and is probably among the smallest Rails plugins available, aren’t all the best plugins tiny?

To use the javascript_auto_include firstly install the plugin:

script/plugin install http://kernowsoul.com/svn/plugins/javascript_auto_include

Or if you run EDGE rails or rails 2.1 and above:

script/plugin install git://github.com/kernow/javascript_auto_include.git

The plugin will create the directory “views” within your javascripts directory in which you can place javascript files for auto inclusion. Using javascript_auto_include is simple, in the layout file add < %= javascript_auto_include_tags %> to the header.

There are two types of javascript includes, view specific, and controller specific. The first is achieved by creating a folder with the same name as a controller, inside this create a javascript file with the same name as a view. The second type, controller specific, are simply files inside the views folder with the same name as the controller. For example:

/public
  /javascripts
    /views
      articles.js # will be included in all views of the articles controller
      /users
        new.js # will be included in the new view of the users controller

The plugin will also include both controller and view specific javascript at the same time, in this example both users.js and new.js will be included when the new view is loaded.

/public
  /javascripts
    /views
      users.js
      /users
        new.js

If you have any comments or suggestions for improvements we would love to hear them. I may add a generator to make adding new javascript files easy.

Media72 are pleased to announce the immediate availability of mod_rails driven Ruby on Rails hosting packages. Mod_rails, or Phusion Passenger as it is also known, has been gaining a lot of attention recently, and rightly so. It’s a huge step forward for the Rails hosting community in terms of application deployment and management. Many big names in the industry such as David Heinemeier Hansson and Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) already have good things to say about mod_rails.

Mod_rails vastly simplifies Ruby on Rails deployment, no longer will you have to mess around with .htaccess files or deal with fastcgi fickleness. Deployment can be as simple as uploading your rails application then loading it in your browser. And restarting your application is achieved by simply creating a text file called restart.txt in your rails tmp directory, what could be more simple?

Our customers are already enjoying the benefits of mod_rails and we are one of the only hosts in the UK to offer support for mod_rails at this time. All of our rails accounts are hosted in our well connected London data centre which means fantastic speeds around Europe. Using Media72 you will also enjoy better search engine rankings with the UK engines when compared to hosting elsewhere.

Why not take a look at our comprehensive range of mod_rails based packages? Prices start from only £7 a month.

It has come to our attention that many users have not been receiving system update notifications via email due to spam filters of incorrect email addresses in our system. We will now be publishing all update notifications to our blog, as well as to all affected users via their primary contact email. What follows is a repost of the details sent out to customers last week:

As of today, all severs now only have versions 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 1.2.6, and 1.1.6 or the rails gem installed. Please update any rails applications you have to use these versions only. To update the version of rails you are using edit your config/environment.rb file and set the RAILS_GEM_VERSION to one of the installed versions.

Our rails version policy is to keep most new versions of rails installed, unless a security hole or performance issue has been identified, and two old major versions. For instance, at this time we have two flavours of 2.x and the two most up-do-date old versions, 1.2.6 and 1.1.6.

When the next major version of rails is release, e.g. 2.1 or above, we will send out notifications and remove version 1.1.6. We will be keeping rails version 1.2.6 for some time to support legacy customers as the upgrade from 1.x to 2.x can require some amount of work.

The Media72 Team

We are experiencing issues with the bingo server currently. Some websites will display a permission denied error when loading. We are working to fix the issue and hope to have service back to normal shortly and will update this post when the issue has been resolved. Thank you for your patience.

update: This issue has now been resolved

The Media72 Team