Hello everyone!
Well, first thing's first. Sorry for the massive delay on the D3.js tutorials. I hope to release the next one this weekend, although with the upcoming holiday (the International Women's Day is pretty popular in Russia and is an official day off too) I might be a bit too busy. In the meantime though, I'd like to rant on this very blog a bit.
The blog (the software it's running on) was hand-written by myself with lots of love and, as you might've guessed, lots of stupid decisions. I'm a very inexperienced web developer and the fact that this is the first project of mine that has been deployed on a proper server somewhere on the Internet doesn't exactly help.
So I'm planning to change some things around here. Most of them are just maintenance-related stuff that you won't actually see... Although you might feel them. =) I want to:
- Install and configure the monitoring software. I tried to work with Monit, but it's apparently a lot better with init-style processes (Nginx, PostgreSQL and such) than with RVM and Unicorn that are not launched via init scripts. I'm thinking about configuring God. Looks like really cool software.
- Switch application servers. Unicorn is nice and all but it eats away quite a lot of memory. Between two workers and the master they consume more than 50% of the available memory as we speak. I'm thinking about Puma as the replacement. After all, my app should be thread-safe, right, guys? Right?
- Think about switching ORMs. Right now I use ActiveRecord which seems like overkill (and is known to consume quite a lot of RAM). I thought of getting rid of an ORM altogether and using the PostgreSQL driver but that means I'd need to implement my own pagination. Which might or might not be cool. Maybe use Sequel instead?
- Reconfigure Nginx to serve gzipped assets.
- Reconfigure Nginx to serve images from the server itself (I'm using Imgur right now. Shameful display!)
- Implement a better routine for uploading posts. I don't want it to be an open web route (for obvious security reasons), but right now it's quite a lot of semi-manual database work. Not cool.
- Maybe do some redesign. Like go for lighter colors. I dunno.
Thank you very much for bearing with me and please tell me what you think about all this! Do you have any other advice on me keeping this blog? Anything you'd like me to do?