Setting up simple OmniAuth authentication with Facebook

by Monica Olinescu on February 1, 2011

If you have watched Ryan Bates’ tutorial Simple OmniAuth you probably already know OmniAuth is awesome. :) Ryan doesn’t go into details about setting up OmniAuth with Facebook so this post has a couple of pointers to help out in that regard. It’s meant as a continuation to the screencast, so if you haven’t seen it start there.

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Configuring Nginx and Unicorn

by Razvan on July 9, 2010

I first heard about Unicorn in an interview with 37Signal’s server admin Mark Imbriaco and it made me really curious. There are a few great resources explaining how Unicorn works and a neat benchmark comparing Mongrel, Passenger and Unicorn. I will share my experience playing with Nginx and Unicorn on a Debian Lenny box.

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Handling paperclip attachments with the same name

by Monica Olinescu on June 16, 2010

This quick post is about some Paperclip-related code that I see quite frequently that could cause problems. It’s easy to miss this stuff in development and then get major headaches later.

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Setting up a High Availability Ruby on Rails environment with keepalived, nginx, HA Proxy and Thin on Debian Lenny

by Razvan on May 15, 2010

Contents

  • Configure Keepalived and Nginx
  • Configure HA Proxy
  • Configure Thin

Overview

Nginx and HA Proxy have similar functions: they can both be used as reverse proxies and load balancers. In our case Nginx will be the reverse proxy and HA Proxy will be the load balancer. Nginx is great for dealing with SSL encryption, gzip compression or talking to a cache server (Varnish, memcached).

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Building your own Lightbox with Javascript (part 1)

by Razvan on February 21, 2010

See the final result of part 1: Demo

Why write your own lightbox?

The simple answer is: to learn how it’s done. If you’re going to use if for an image gallery, embed flash and videos or even to load Ajax content you are probably better off using one of the many existing lightbox plugins (Thickbox, FancyBox). If you plan to use a lightbox for more complex applications like the admin back end of a cms (see the future Drupal 7 Admin Panel ) then you should either fully understand every line of your plugin or write your own.

This tutorial assumes some knowledge of Javascript. If you are just starting Javascript I highly recommend watching Jeffrey Way’s Javascript from null video series on nettuts.com.

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