RackSpace Is The Best

Unless You Don’t Want To Pay For Managed Hosting
Or You Want Ruby on Rails Support

An entry level server at RackSpace will cost you about $500/month. If you can afford a managed, dedicated server, and your are working with PHP host with RackSpace. I have several servers with RackSpace and have been working with them now for over 5 years. The service, support, and reliability are fantastic unless you intend to host Ruby on Rails applications. RackSpace does not “officially support” Rails. When you are talking to the sales department they say they will help with Rails issues even though it’s not officially supported. My experience is that you are totally on your own with Ruby on Rails at Rackspace.

RimuHosting Is The Best For Non-Managed Servers

The Best VPS, Semi-Dedicated and Dedicated Servers

So if you want to run Rails apps or you don’t need a managed dedicated server, host with RimuHosting. This blog is hosted at RimuHosting and for the past 2 years I have had both VPS accounts and Dedicated servers there. The uptime, performance and reliability has been extremely good although not quite flawless. There was one time when one of my semi-dedicated VPS accounts was unavailable for about an hour and it was not a scheduled maintenance period. Even with that one blip in the service, my overall experience has been excellent and I highly recommend RimuHosting if you want a VPS account or a non-managed dedicated server. The support is extremely fast and helpful - albeit via email only. I prefer email though, as long as it’s attended to promptly. In your customer control panel, you can see the status of your support ticket, how long it has been since you have submitted it, whether or not anyone is working on it, etc. It really is better than phone service in my opinion.

HostICan

The Best Shared Hosting Package I’ve Ever Seen

If you just want a low cost shared hosting account, I have never seen a package that is better than the BaseHost package with HostICan. It is $6.95/month and you get 2,000 GB - yes about 2 Terabytes of data storage. You can host 2 different domain names and get a free domain name for life when you sign up. The free domain name is at least worth the cost of one month of hosting each year. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If you want a WordPress blog, the WordPress software is already there and ready to go. So this is great account to have if you want to host your own blog. You can even get SSH access but that adds a little to your monthly cost. They no longer support Ruby on Rails. But, if your building Rails apps, get a VPS account at RimuHosting.

• Open a new mail message
• Create a link in your mail message
• Copy your link into your signature

Here is a quick screencast to show you how to pull this off. Not only does this work with links, but it also works with any other type of formatting in your mail message - bold, italics, fonts, etc.

model_name[attribute_name]
For Example...
contact[first_name]
contact[last_name]
etc.

I do this so that I can easily retrieve all the attributes for each model and then quickly store them to the database using CodeIgniter’s database helper functions. For example, taking advantage of the Active Record Insert Syntax, I might write PHP code like this…

...
$contact = $_POST['contact'];
$this->db->insert("contacts", $contact);
...

When I started to use jQuery to do some client side javascript validation on my forms it was not immediately obvious to me that I needed to escape the square brackets in the jQuery calls.

<script language="javascript">
  $(document).ready(function() {
    alert($('contact\[first_name\]).val());
  });
</script>

Due to javascript’s encoding, you need to use double slashes - not just a single slash - to escape the square brackets.

I have found CodeIgniter and have now built 3 sites with it. It’s simple, easy to use, speeds up development, has great documentation and, best of all, has won me as a fan. My most recent CodeIgniter project is an educational/e-commerce site about Rebounding with the Cellerciser While developing the site and reading the site content, I was convinced of the many reasons to use a Cellerciser I’ve now been using a Cellerciser for about 3 months and I love this thing!

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tar -czf archive.tgz dirName

The short answer is, you can’t! Unfortunately, this functionality won’t be available until the 1.5 release of the Zend Framework. But you can write your own utitlity function to sort your Rowset for you.

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1. Create a View Helper
2. Access your Zend_View object from the View Helper (or instantiate a new one)
3. Render a view script from within the View Helper

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Setting Up Exceptions For preDispatch

If your login screen is managed by a different controller, the setup described above is fine. If, however, your login screen is managed by an action in the same controller as the protected actions, you will want to allow unauthenticated access to the login screen. To do this, we need to exclude certain actions from the authentication check. Ruby on Rails let’s you define :except => :actionName to allow certain actions to skip the before_filter. With the Zend Framework, we have to implement that functionality on our own… but it’s easy.

What Action Is Being Called?

To set up your preDispatch function to skip checking to see if a user is logged in for certain actions you need to know which action is being called. You do that like this…

$action = $this->_request->getActionName();

Example Code

Now all you have to do is see if the action that is being called is one of the actions that you want to skip. I set up a private function called verify() to check whether or not the visitor is logged in. If the user is not logged in, I forward them to the loginAction() function. Since an unauthenticated user needs to be able to access the login screeen, we tell the preDispatch() function not to verify visitors requesting the login action. My controller ends up looking someting like this.

class AccountController extends Zend_Controller_Action {

  function preDispatch() {
    // Discover what action is being requested
    $action = $this->_request->getActionName();

    // Create a list of actions which allow unauthenticated access
    $exclusions = array("login");
    if(!in_array($action, $exclusions)) {
      $this->verify();
    }
  }

  /**
   * Check to see if the visitor is logged in. If not, send to loginAction
  */
  private function verifty() {
    $auth = Zend_Auth::getInstance();
    if(!$auth->hasIdentity()) {
      $this->_forward("login");
    }
  }

  function loginAction() {
    // Display your login screen
  }

  // Continue the rest of your class...
}

In the meantime, we have two new products on the website. By popular demand, we now have an amazing set of speakerless noise reduction headphones. We also have a great budget set of noise canceling headphones that are smaller than our premier EX-29 Extreme Isolation Headphones. This makes them great for travel!

$view = new Zend_View();
$view->addHelperPath("DU/View/Helper", "DU_View_Helper");
$viewRenderer = new Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer();
$viewRenderer->setView($view);
Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper($viewRenderer);

Put those lines of code in your index.php file somewhere before you call dispatch() on your front controller and all of you view scripts will have access to your own library of View Helpers.

My company’s name is Digital Underware so I have my library set up just like the Zend library in the lib directory of my application. The path to my View Helpers is lib/DU/View/Helper just like the path to the built-in Zend View Helpers is lib/Zend/View/Helper.

If you are interested in seeing a complete example, take a look at this bootstrap file.