I was about to say something about how a Gruff Graph displaying the height of web notabilities could be funny, but when I tried to post the comment i got the dreaded 500 error.

Seems like you’re on the way to style those messages. That’s very cool!

Hey were you at the Austin on Rails Party? Couldn’t find ya there…

Somebody posted this bit on the rails list last year some time. Drop it in your /lib directory and off your go (I hope it renders ok in your comments…):

module ActionController
 module Rescue
   protected
     # Overwrite to implement public exception handling (for requests answering false to <tt>local_request?</tt>).
     def rescue_action_in_public(exception) #:doc:
       case exception
         when RoutingError, UnknownAction then
           render_text(IO.read(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public','404.html')), "404 Not Found")
         else
           render_text(IO.read(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', '500.html')), "500 Server Error")
       end
     end
 end
end

To the best of my knowledge, none of them can shoot lightning from their fingertips or walk through walls.

I guess you haven’t seen _why yet then?

Yeah. That error is definitely a tell-tale sign of a Rails app, which is a bit unnerving to me as a Rails developer. I guess that’s what comes with such a new framework. I can’t help but be jealous of how much server side support is out there for PHP… sometimes I have to look at the source code of a php app just to remind myself that it’s worth it :).

I’ve also been impressed with the approachability of people at SXSW. I find that usually THEY are cool – but I still get a little nervous.

I also stopped by the Austin on Rails event (and played some shuffleboard, darts) but was a little disappointed in the setup. I wanted to actually talk about rails, not just be in the same building as other railers.

I’m kind of anti-bar by nature (call me prematurely old). I wish there were something at the conf where many of us could meet up in a meaningful way.

And what’s the worst panel you’ve seen so far? Mine was the “Creating Buzz” today. It was led heads of sites about: people getting punched in the nuts videos, mega-band street teams (Metallica, Korn), and porn. The techniques used to market these sophmoric “businesses” are really irrelevant to 99% who do something respectable. The best part was the porn girl explaining how she had a “do what it takes” method to get band interviews. The dots aren’t too far apart in that picture.

I forgot to mention that Gillian Carson was super nice and spoke well of you, Geoff.

We noticed your blog is focused in Ruby and Ruby On Rails and that is why we would like to invite you to register yourself and your blog at RubyCorner, a directory of Ruby related blogs:

http://www.rubycorner.com/

We like to think about RubyCorner as a “meeting place” for the community, also as a “focal point” where the people new to this technology can quickly tune into the pulse of the community. Registering your blog will help build a valuable resource for this growing community.

Thanks.

You don’t see professional scale applications throwing those errors. I think the biggest problems is that the Rails framework “magic” depends on a well-oiled server admin. Now the fancy magic attracts a lot of ‘nubies on rails’, but the idea of paying for proper hosting does not. Care to guess how many blogs running on shared hosts with very flimsy support for rails administered by php converts who still think Apache is an indigenous tribe that got a raw deal?

(Hint: I’m one of them)

Yeah, that was me that mentioned the random 500 errors. Nice meeting you Geoff! I’m hoping that moving to a dedicated box or VPS hosting (just gotta commit) will resolve that issue.

- Scott