Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Control Library

amazon-ec2 is a super slick library that makes it super-easy to control Amazon EC2 instances in Ruby code. It also comes with a special shell "ec2sh" that gives you a much nicer (in my opinion) interface to control and manipulate EC2 instances than the usual command line tools provided by Amazon. The documentation for this is superb with examples of using all of the various methods it provides, ec2sh, and examples of EC2 control from Ruby and Rails apps.

RubyWorks Production Stack on Amazon EC2

Continuing with the Amazon EC2 theme, Nutrun posts about rubyworks-ec2, a set of Capistrano recipes and utilities to deploy the Rubyworks Production Stack (a complete Ruby and Rails stack) on Amazon EC2 instances. The stack includes Apache 2, HAProxy load balancer, Mongrel, monit, and a bunch of other useful tools. If you want a way to get a Rails / Ruby stack running on an EC2 instance in minutes, this is essential reading.

Simple Geocoding in Ruby

The Cartographer library is an old-time favorite for doing geocoding from Rails applications. A developer with Assay Depot, however, decided that a more direct approach of querying Google for the results was necessary. The result is a 49 line module that can return latitude, longitude, address, street, and other geographical information when provided with, say, a ZIP or a street address.

Tutorial for Installing and Configuring Nginx and Rails on Ubuntu

James O'Kelly has put together a comprehensive tutorial going through all of the stages necessary to install and configure Nginx and Rails together to run applications on an Ubuntu server. James' blog RailsJitsu.com is definitely worth a look (and perhaps to subscribe to!) as he seems to have a knack for regularly putting together good Rails (and especially Mephisto) focused posts.

Presentation: Haml and Sass in 15 Minutes

Haml is a markup language commonly used by Rails developers that makes it easy to produce well-formatted, valid XHTML in as few lines as possible. Sass is similar, but for CSS (supporting nested rules, referencing parent rules, and lots of other time saving goodness). In "Haml and Sass in 15 Minutes", Patrick Crowley guides us through using these two technologies.