• fixed problem with the data validation
• fixed a redirect problem when you entered bad data, resulting in a 500 error.
• tweaked CSS a bit for flash[:notice

HERE

What is Royner?

Good question. Well, you sign up with either a Google Talk (Gtalk) or Jabber instant message screen name, give Royner a url for a RSS/ATOM feed (i.e. Feedburner)

Please give me some feed back on Royner. I didn’t put tons and tons of hours into Royner (the majority on Backgroundrb, which is working beautifully now), but I’d like to keep it alive if the demand is there.

There are some to-do’s left:

Set Royner up so that you can respond to IM’s with “OK” or something and Royner will quit looking for that key word.

Hasta pasta

As mentioned, I decided to give Nginx a try. I have to admit, initial set up is very easy.  I first setup the Rails enviornment and had Nginx proxy to two mongrels for each app.  (I’m running two apps for four total Mongrels).  No problem.

Next, I had to get php working.  Not so easy.

I ended up looking for help and followed this, setting up php5 to run as fast-cgi.  Ugh.  To make things worse, I had to move over the Wordpress install from Godaddy.  I assummed it would be easy as pie, and it was to an extent, but I ran into trouble with the way the virtual hosts configs nginx uses handle subdomains and .. long story short I had redirect loop happening and it just sucked.

I’m blabering on and on here, but in the end I’ve got everything up and running.  We’ll see how Nginx works in the long term, but right now it seems pretty snappy and the memory footprint is much smaller than Apache.

So, Royner and another project of mine have a place to live and I’m just gonna do some final tweaks this weekend and then you can check them out.

-Linux Mint home networking is now done and working beautifully. Had some trouble getting the onboard Via Chrome9 Video working correctly, but I followed the instructions here(compiling it from source) and everything was great. I wanted to use the OpenChrome driver instead of the VESA driver because the OpenChrome one has support for XvMC which accellerates all kinds of video (i.e. Xvid, mpeg4…). Only thing left to do is get a static IP so I can get to my machine from the outside world.

-Royner – I haven’t had much time to work on ironing out any of the kinks before a first release. Hopefully this week will be different. Thinking about Slicehost to host it, as I’ve heard great things about them. I’m also going to try out deprec for deployment, using Nginx instead of Apache. Should be interesting.

Other than thats, its another work week. See ya’ll.

Really simple – you give Royner a feed (Atom, RSS, XML) and Royner monitors that feed for some keywords that you define. So, lets say you want to monitor the Slickdeals.net RSS feed of deals for “FAR” (Free after rebate). When something is posted that is free after rebate, Royner will send you an IM letting you know of the deal and the url. You could use it for whatever you want. Monitor blogs, Digg, hell, even your email.

Currently, only Jabber/GTalk is supported since it is the easiest to integrate.

Pretty neat eh?
Heres some screenies. Hopefully it will be ready for the public in a week or so.

The one thing I’ll say is this though – I used backgroundrb to monitor the feeds. Now, once I got it running ok, it worked wonderfully, but I swear it was the most difficult Rails plugin to get working. I spent an ENTIRE day trying to get it to work. In the end, I uninstalled and reinstalled the plugin and that did it. The first time I installed, for some reason an old version was installed and none of the documentation worked. Blah.