Maybe Heroku changed something, or maybe it's the new Cedar stack, but using private gems from Github is pretty easy. It apparently didn't work before. The important part is in your ~/.ssh/config Host heroku.com ForwardAgent yes After that it's no big deal. Just use an ssh URL to Github (or wherever, the Github part doesn't really matter) in your Gemfile and off you go! source :rubygems ruby '1.9.3' gem 'sinatra', :git => 'git@github.com:darkhel…

Let's get some background information out of the way. I'm working on a new application, and am using crazy new things that I haven't had a chance to really use before. Rails 3, MongoDB, Redis and Resque, HTML5, etc. 1 With all these things, I figured I'll just use EngineYard since I can pretty much do whatever I want with the server, and they have a lot of the "stuff" taken care of. But they don't support MongoDB out of the box, and you have to …

Lots of interesting things are afoot, and I try to keep track of them. Here's what I'm watching. Rails 3 Lots of new changes are coming with Rails 3, and it's pretty exciting. I wrote about some of the cool ones here. Rails is shaping up to be faster, more modular, and generally better and easier to work with. With all the smart people working on it, you don't have to look very hard to realize this is going to be a big release, and is only going…

In case you missed it, the Coding Horror, Stack Overflow and Haacked blogs died in almost a literal fire. Well I don't think there was an actual fire, but basically they all hosted their blogs in virtual machines on the same physical server, and the backup process never backed up the virtual machine files since they were always in use. The backup process was managed by the hosting company and silently failed on these files. Oops. While I'm fairl…

Hopefully you didn't notice much, except the speed increase, but my blog is no longer on the behemoth that is Wordpress. While Wordpress served me well for quite some time on my other blog it always kind of bugged me. Well no more! I took a couple days (basically 2 full days and 2 evenings) and wrote my own little blogging engine from scratch. You can find it on github and get forking if you so choose. What I used: ruby and sinatra They are pret…

Adam Wiggins hooked me up with the Heroku stuff (and by hooked up, I mean I emailed Heroku support and he enabled the services for me), and so I moved my professional online presence to be hosted on Heroku. The URL is the same as before (http://www.darkhax.com), but now it should be just a bit snappier, and easier for me to deploy to. If you haven't at least checked out Heroku by visiting the site, do so now.