Ruby-on-Rails

One organization I do a lot of work with hosts their sites on a 1&1 Managed Server. Essentially, only their sites and applications are running on the server, but 1&1 manage all of the sysadmin work, and don’t provide root access. I have a number of misgivings about the configuration of the server, particularly the fact that the user’s root folder is also the document root for their main domain, but 1&1 have been good about keeping PHP up to date, and we don’t have to worry about being woken at 3am to fix stuck processes. Unfortunately, Ruby hasn’t been treated to the same attention as PHP and the system version is still languishing at version 1.8.1, which won’t handle rails for us. ...

A couple of years ago I moved the discussion boards on Sarah Masen’s website over from a rather nasty tangle of PHP and HTML that I had chosen for its threading view, to the considerably more flexible Phorum. Phorum has been serving us well, but a number of regular posters have lately been reminding me that the move left our archives from the old software inaccessible. I had always intended to put together a quick collection of scripts to allow access to those archives, possibly with some searching, but the prospect of getting it all together with the appropriate threading and the legacy database had put me off. That was before I read about Rails’ acts_as_tree option. ...