Jun 10, 2011 Posted by BoxCycle

Months of Frustration or How BoxCycle Got a Speed Boost

The last few months have been pretty exciting for BoxCycle. We are seeing more visits, more listings, and more orders and we are refining the process to help us keep up and provide the best possible experience for buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, the last few months have also been maddening. Just as traffic improved, website performance became slow and unreliable. We tried a number of things to... read more

May 23, 2011 Posted by BoxCycle

Keep Last Modified Dates with Capistrano Deploy and SVN/Git

BoxCycle is a Rails application that just switched to Git from SVN for version control and uses Capistrano to help automate deployment. Problem: Deploy Updates Last Modified Dates on All Files As shocking as it may seem, when you deploy a new version of your app, there is a good chance that Last Modified dates of all files will be updated to the date of deployment even though most of those files did not... read more

Apr 14, 2010 Posted by BoxCycle

Time Zone Support and A+ Sellers

Since the last post, most of the updates to BoxCycle have been small usability improvements and internal process improvements.  The most interesting customer facing feature we’ve added is A+ Sellers.  I have a well-developed idea of a rating system BoxCycle will use in the future to relay seller performance to buyers, giving them additional information relevant during order placement.  However, I... read more

Jul 8, 2009 Posted by BoxCycle

Permission Denied During Rails Freeze Gems

Hopefully, this will save some Rails programmers a bit of searching. Permission denied – activesupport-2.3.2 or activesupport error when trying to run rake rails:freeze:gems?  For solution refer to http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/184589 .  In a nutshell, you need to edit line 28 of rubylibrubygems1.8gemsrails-2.3.2libtasksframework.rake to include sleep(5) between the Gem::GemRunner line and the... read more

May 9, 2009 Posted by BoxCycle

Rails Plugin Updates, SVN, and Piston 2.0.2 on Windows

I haven’t done a programming related blog entry until this one.  Why?  First, I want to keep this blog focused on BoxCycle and environmental issues.  Second, I haven’t had much time, as is evident from lack of posts on environmental issues.  Finally, I haven’t run into much that I couldn’t find an answer to with a few searches and I am not fond of duplicating effort just to... read more