HTTPS still has deployment misconceptions, including the need for a separate public IP address per secure site.

deploy-to-production now runs Capistrano via bundle exec, avoiding version mismatches when Capistrano is bundled in projects.

Run JavaScript from Ruby without choosing a runtime manually; ExecJS automatically selects an available engine and returns results as Ruby objects.

Rails 3.1 adds jQuery by default, streaming responses, role-based attr_accessible, prepared statements, and simpler migrations.

Automated installation of the Passenger Apache module avoids interactive prompts and enables non-interactive builds with passenger-install-apache2-module --auto.

Blueprint inspects installed packages, changed config files, and locally built software to generate Puppet, Chef, or shell code from an Ubuntu system state.

Selenium has been the siren song that continually calls out to us. Unfortunately, in practice we’ve been unable to get Selenium to run reliably for real applications, on both developers machines and on the continuous integration server. This failure with Selenium has caused us to search for alternative solutions

This document describes an agreement between web servers and search engine crawlers that allows for dynamically created content to be visible to crawlers. Google currently supports this agreement. The hope is that other search engines will also adopt this proposal.

Physical servers worked, EC2 did not.

Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention, but over the past few years an interesting variation of CSS Sprites has been getting a lot of play on large web sites that serve millions of users.

Web 2.0 sites have lots of tiny javascript/css files, which causes one extra round trip per file to the server and back! This is bad! Bundle-fu throws it all up into a big package and sends it out all at once.

So, as a result, people using RESTful ideas to talk to browsers have to put the smarts back on the server. They invent new URLs which (for example) return a resource, but return it all wrapped up in the HTML needed to display it as a form for browser-based editing.

Rfm brings your FileMaker data to Ruby with elegance and speed. Now your Ruby scripts and Rails applications can talk directly to your FileMaker server with a syntax that just feels right.

sing Google’s JavaScript Library CDN comes with a 1/3 of a second tax on missing. (Note that a tax like this applies to opening connections to a any new host: JavaScript Library CDNs, advertisers, analytics and visitor tracking, etc. This is why you should try to reduce the number of different hostnames you serve content from.)

Large scale server deploys using BitTorrent and the BitTornado library.

jsPDF is an open-source library for generating PDF documents using nothing but Javascript. You can use it in a Firefox extension, in Server Side Javascript and with Data URIs in some browsers.

Next in our series on not shooting yourself in the foot: Doing a sudo shutdown -h now on the main database server right before you head home to cook dinner for six.