Well I came across a “problem” the other day in Rails. It turns out that Rails is not exactly thread safe at the CGI level. What this really means is that it waits for a file upload to finish before another can happen, which for a busy file uploading site is not actually good. But, since I have read that this is not as big of a deal as you would have thought if using Mongrel because it magically handles multithreading requests and only offloads the request to Rails once it has finished, meaning that it is only blocked whilst being mime parsed etc, which is not that bad. But whilst thinking oh shit I came across Merb, which is another Ruby framework that is really cool and extremely lightweight meaning its nice and fast. It also allows you to pick from a selection of ORM providers such as Sequel, Datamapper and of course ActiveRecord. The main advantage is that it has its own CGI handlers and effectively handles multiple file uploads concurrently which is big benefit.

This does not mean that I am now going to switch over to Merb – infact not a chance. Rails is now very very good at what it does and has a million plugins that are very useful (most can also be used in Merb) and it is very useful for the actual application side of the system. It has so many useful features that its hard to explain them all. But it does mean that I can use Merb for all file handling activities. Its fast and allows me to handle multiple files effectively. In fact it was my original plan that we would someday move file handling off the main app to another server just so that the system can run the application so much faster. As it turns out, this is what some very heavy traffic sites have begun to do which means the idea isn’t totally crazy. You might as well let things do what they are good at hadn’t you? Another good thing is that we can share code between the Rails and Merbs apps. Like I said, Merb lets you use ActiveRecord which means all the models are available in both apps without any code duplication so it makes sense.

I am sure that you have already noticed but I have now added a Meebo chat box on the site. I do not know how often I will be online because I don’t get much chance these days but I thought it was cool and you never know, I could be on one day

It’s now coming along nicely, if a little slow at times. John is currently working on the coming soon pages and blog which should be ready at the end of the week. This should help us to get past the Google sandbox effect when we release in a few months (hopefully ) and also allow to get details from people who are interested. There will be a bit of advertising done just to get the word around so that people know who we are and what we are doing by the time we release, or else it will be more work trying to get customers later on. I am continuing working on the security layer. I have had some problems with the logic, but it seems to be coming together alright. I have been trying to create a customizable privilege system based on the smallest amount of tables and code as possible to make it “simple” but as flexible as possible. But that obviously brings its own complications. I still believe that onceI have done that though the rest should be more plain sailing. I still have to put proper file handling methods in place because we will be distributing files over the network but until the security layer is completed there is no point in doing this. Everything else is just built on top of the security/file system layers so should make more sense once the libraries are in place to handle those. I plan to go through the interface with John next week or the week after (depending on how this week goes) to tie the two together so that we have a prototype system in place to demo to potential customers.

SmellBeautiful.co.uk is still being developed by the guys at Arpey Internet and I look forward to what they have done. I have not received any preliminary designs back yet so have nothing to show you as of now, but I will as soon as I have something to show.

I am taking a leaf out of Carl’s book and putting my blog onto Technorati. I honestly did not know that you could add it yourself. I thought that they somehow managed to find you based on links from other blogs that they have on file. Obviously not

Here is the code:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/jfv9bewjq5″ rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

Who knows, it might bring in a few new readers.

I am at the point that I need to get a server for my store, blog and forum. I am looking about for a good deal but was wondering if anyone knew of any good services out there with servers in the UK. I say the UK because the store is currently only available here (with other European countries later) so I would like it to be slightly more responsive, although with the speed of some hosting companies these days it might not make much difference even if the servers were in the states. But I believe that there are now services and certain shop reviewers that will note what country the shop is based (well the server) and it could look a little dodgy when I am meant to be serving only UK people if it based in Timbuktu.

So any recommendations will do. I am still looking into whether to get a full blown server or just a VPC. As Carl mentioned to me before, perhaps one of the Bitfolk VPC solutions will do the trick. So any recommendations would be greatly appreciated allowing me to weigh up my options.

Thanks.