Nance's Kitchen

What a freakin’ error that is huh?  I kept getting it while trying to work on my 3-year old usability testing service.

Turns out it’s a conflict with Comatose and rails authentication.   Here’s the fix:

http://groups.google.com/group/comatose-plugin/browse_thread/thread/284a4a6698a6d9/f698dc284eb1451c?lnk=gst&q=A+copy+of+AuthenticatedSystem+has+been+removed+from+the+module+tree+but+is+still+active!#f698dc284eb1451c

Add ‘unloadable’ to line 3 of  comatose_admin_controller.rb


# The controller for serving cms content...

A few years ago I launched a website usability testing service called EasyUsability.  I haven’t spent a great deal of time on it in the last year or so (day job is keeping me quite busy), but it showed some early promise on getting very targeted feedback on your website, from your exact target market.      To get our website testers, we used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a workforce on demand solution, with a robust API.

At the time, writing to the API was very pretty painful, a job that took us weeks to get right, and is still buggy in certain cases.

Fast forward to a week ago, and I am happy to report integrating Rails apps with Mechanical Turk is now much easier.   I am playing around with a website that offers accent training, which will use mechanical turk workers to help improve peoples’ accents.     Upon doing some searches for Ruby on Rails/Mechanical Turk gems, I ran across RTurk and Turkee.   These gems make integrating Mechanical Turk into your rails app a one day exercise, vs. a multi-week exercise.   Great stuff.

One tip – be SURE to have RTurk installed and configured before trying to install and generate the Turkee stuff.

Found a great post on how to regularly backup your heroku app, check it out here: http://ultra.bohe.me/post/283128954/back-up-your-heroku-app-with-a-cron-job

I am working on a project that needs to use a domain registration API, and was having trouble finding one.   After looking at enom, godaddy, etc., I finally stumbled across Namecheap‘s API, and am happy to report it’s really good.  Have a look:

http://developer.namecheap.com/docs/

You can register domains, change CNAME records, add funds to your account, and a whole lot more.  Kudos to the Namecheap team.

Ever find yourself wanting to check to see if a domain is available?  How about having a big blob of xml or json you need to make pretty?  Here are three tools I use:

• To check domain availability – www.InstantDomainSeach.com. Very fast, good deal links to GoDaddy and other registrars.
• To indent xml – www.xmlindenter.com
• To indent json – www.jsonlint.com

They save me a a few minutes here and there each day, hopefully they can save you some time too.

One of the rules of the thumb for SEO is to make sure you don’t have any duplicate content. When you talk to SEO experts, they’ll say:

DO NOT HAVE ANY DUPLICATE CONTENT!

Phew, sorry for the yelling. It turns out that Google gets very confused when it finds two urls that have exactly the same content. For some reason, Mr. Google thinks these are two different pages:
http://www.movingtruck.com/moving-boxes/NJ/Bayonne
http://www.movingtruck.com/moving-boxes/NJ/Bayonne/

If you look in your webmaster tools account, you can see how you get penalized for this here:

Why? Who knows. The question is not to ask why, it’s how do we fix it?

So what does Heroku and Rails have to do with this? Heroku makes hosting Rails apps a breeze, it’s where I host all of my projects, including MovingTruck.com, which helps people find moving trucks (logical, huh?).  Unfortunately, Rails makes it a bit tough to remove trailing slashes, and Heroku is a bit of a locked down environment (in a good way, yeah Heroku!), so finding the answer to this vexing problem takes a bit of digging.

Enter my good friends at ELCTech, with this post.     Solving this is as simple as:

1. running “sudo gem install rack-rewrite”
2. and inserting the following code in your config/environment.rb file  (don’t forget to add the gem to your .gems file either)

config.gem 'rack-rewrite', '~> 0.1.2'

require 'rack-rewrite'
 config.middleware.insert_before(Rack::Lock, Rack::Rewrite) do
 r301 %r{^/(.*)/$}, '/$1'
end

And there you have it.  A tasty solution to your trailing slash SEO woes on Rails.  Enjoy.   Many thanks to ELC for their post.

UPDATE FOR RAILS 3

Here’s a quick update to get this working with Rails 3.

Instead of requiring the gem in your environment file, put the following line in you GemFile:

gem 'rack-rewrite', '~> 1.0.0'

And this in your config/application.rb

    config.middleware.insert_before(Rack::Lock, Rack::Rewrite) do
     r301 %r{^/(.*)/$}, '/$1'
    end