But using a host like Dreamhost has some other nice little bonuses. Like for instance today I discovered that they had upgraded Rails and removed the old version I was using. Now that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as they posted they would a while ago. But having been working on a couple of new features, whenever I could be bothered to look at it. I was putting off just deplying a compatibility fix. Of course I had never gotten the features done and now the upgrade finally hit, resulting in my site no longer working.

So as a result had to do an emergency release. Lucky I had already gotten most of the site working on Rails 2.1.1 so it wasn’t a big deal. But they also released Rails 2.2.2 so now I have to get that working before they remove 2.1.1 as well…. *sigh*

Bree-land Homesteads
Bainburg
Bedbourne
Blackwell
Bronburg
Burrstow
Flinthurst
Flitton
Grimstable
Hamlin
Hirfold
Knockhouse
Melcot
Westcomb

Falathlorn Homesteads
Amon Thanc
Celethmar
Dol Luith
Ecthelhad
Imlad Lind
Thorellant

Shire Homesteads
Berrybridge
Cropfurrows
Mousehill

And I also fixed Maremead as it should be Haremead
Thorin’s Halls Homesteads
Aisgarth
Dólgrof
Geirskáli
Kvisgren
Lindgarth
Mestrof

Now settle down Turbine! It’s very annoying when you change something without us, who leeches of your functionality, isn’t informed of it.

Tags: LotRO, Laurelin, Google Maps, Turbine

Tags: LotRO

I had been on it already before christmas. But motivation was lacking and it turned out it required some modifications to get going. Specifically the wise guys of Rails Core decided nobody was using pagination so it had to go. Or possibly they decided they where unable to improve it and hoped the community would fill the gap with something better? So the old pagination stuff was kicked out of Rails 2 and replaced with an optional (and likely very unsupported) plugin while telling everyone to use something else.

So I turned to will_pagination as it seemed like it was the most recommended one of the young Rails 2 scene. It appears to work well but I had to redo my pagination control. So far I have just hacked something ugly together… seems to work with the ugly site anyway.

The biggest hurdle then was that my auth_generator-based user-login system seems to have been unsupported for ages. And it had several issues with Rails 2. And that my use of pagination with the acts_as_taggable_on_steroids plugin had to be changed. Both was fairly simply. The latter would have been tricky if I hadn’t found a trick in a comment on on a blog. The actual proposed fix in the main blog entry being way too much work for me to bother with

On the up-side it seems that Rails 2 run a bit faster than Rails 1 did. Maybe it’s just placebo tho. I guess I’ll have to see about that.

Then I fixed a slight bug on the site (if someone used ‘ in a name that was to show up in the Housing Directory. It would no longer show markers on the map when page loaded). And added Kinship profile links that use the kinship name instead of their id. And off to release it went. So it is now live on Rails 2.

Post release I did get one major annoyance. Mainly that if I use the same cookie name as the Rails 1 site I’d have people throwing exceptions when they first returned to the site. Changing the cookie name should have fixed that. I hope

Okay, so it is still ugly. But functionality-wise it has moved a far distance from back in July when it was just a kinship listing. In between I have added, first, an Events Calendar and now also a Housing Directory.

The events calendar seems to have gone by pretty much unnoticed however. I personally add events I find to it. But nobody else seem to do and I doubt anyone really checks it very often either. A shame really, as it allows people to subscribe to upcoming events either via RSS or iCalendar format. It would make keeping up with the social life on Laurelin easier for most I’d wager.

Also I am a bit proud of the ‘Upcoming Events‘ page that show a list of events and a live countdown until event start. Making timezone calculation a thing of the past… if people actually looked at it . Also it is really missing the official events held. But the official events staff only post vague clues before the events. No time or place information is given.

Last night I then released the latest sprout of functionality, the Housing Directory. Basically anyone can now register what house they live in on the server. The idea is to make it easy to see who you live next to. Or to find where to go to visit someone, but actual searching didn’t make it in the initial release.

The actual map used is a bit of a throw back to some of my previous projects. It turned out Turbine (the people making the game) already had a Google Maps-based map on their official WIKI: LoreBook. So having worked with the API previously I simply use their map tiles and integrated it into my own site (while mentioning where I got it – of course). Then it was just a matter of mapping all the 120 housing locations and writing the backend and frontend code for it to show them.

It was all rushed a bit tho. And it shows. I only tested it in IE on Windows after deployment and then discovered that my dynamically updated drop down selectors seems to be broken there… DAMN! And default security settings block the externally-hosted chat window… Double-DAMN!

I guess I still have some work to do tonight then…

I replaced Vanguard with Lord of the Rings Online and it turns out the community tools are not all that developed. In fact there is a forum for each server and that’s pretty much it. So it’s up to the inhabitants of the servers to figure out how to organize their community and how they want to communicate with each other.

So far we have had forum stickies of kinships and events that one person took the responsibility of updating. This has rarely worked well because we all just want to play the game really. Spending a lot of time on manually updating lists becomes boring after a while. And even the most dedicated people still have other things to do in their spare time anyway.

So I figured it was a good project to work on in Rails. And now it is sort of live here: lotro.houseofkenja.com.

I made some improvements from my previous flirt with Rails. I now have both a development and a production database. And I use the database migration tools in Rails to make update my production database with the latest developments. The latter still takes some effort to get right tho. Since it is much easier to build databases directly in the development database than writing migration files. So I have to hash out the migration files after developing the code… Not too smart as they then don’t get tested much before I release the code to production. But maybe I just haven’t found tools yet to make this easer.

One issue with Rails that came up today is really mind-boggling tho. Having coded Java for years I am so used to not having to work much with character encodings. Everything Java does is in Unicode so you just need to handle the places where things come in and out of it. And mostly it is easy to take care of.

Turns out Rails is not quite ready for the Global Village idea. On an app where everything runs in UTF-8 I still had to apply some hacks to actually get the text displayed correctly. Turns out Rails (or Ruby?) has no support for encodings so it messed up UTF-8 names coming out of my database even tho the web pages are also encoded in UTF-8. Annoying but it seems the hacks work. So one can live with it.

Apart from that I have no real new things to say about Rails. I am getting a feeling that even tho the framework gets a lot of hype it seems there is not that much community around it. Specifically I am finding a lot of stale ‘documentation’ on their WIKI and I find it hard to Google myself to straight answers. And a lot of the community solutions to common issues seems half-baked and either dead or crawling very slowly. I suppose I have been pampered in the Java world where a lot of companies are sponsoring projects and people have had a lot longer to come up with good solutions.

Well. More from the battle-front as this project develops.