Hi!

I haven’t written for a while now on this blog. Since my last post I moved to a little bit more specific content goal in terms of writing.

In the past, the technical blog posts on this blog were highly popular. I plan to continue them on my new blog, Developer Founder. Here, I will write about my daily activities as founding partner and developer of Firmhouse. Also, I will be posting code samples and other cool technical-related items.

My other new blog is -> Inbound (pronounced: Dash Inbound). On this blog I am planning to write about how you can use inbound marketing techniques and principles to boost customer discovery for your own product. I will also write about creating a channel for your product using inbound marketing.

I hope to see you on my new blogs, since I will put this blog on hold for a while.

If you’re interested, you might want to follow me on Twitter: @michiels and @inboundboard.

Hi all,

I had some downtime today so I’m sorry if you could not access this blog to get help on all the topics I right about. Everything should be fixed now. There seemed to be an error with our hosting provider. I’m trying to see if it was something major or if it was just a minor glitch in the power or connectivity or something.

Anyways, back up now so enjoy!

Update: It seemed there was an administrative error with the supplier of my hosting provider. Will not happen again!

This morning I got out of bed, made myself a bowl of cornflakes with milk and headed over to the kitchen table where my dad always puts down the newspaper I’m subscribed to: NRC Next. It’s a Dutch tabloid-format newspaper with daily news and in-depth articles around recent happenings in the world.

I recently resubscribed to it and I love it: I have redacted important news that fit’s to my size of wanting to read a newspaper. I just HATE folding around a large newspaper all the time. I want to have a portable newspaper that I can take with me, easily put in my bag and that falls on my doormat every day. Every night when I read the last less important articles in NRC Next, I’m already waiting for the new issue so I can enjoy another new newspaper-reading day.

So, that’s form and function. Now for the other great thing about NRC next: content.

I really HATE newspaper that just list all the news that happened the day before. They are just paper versions of the RSS feeds and news sites I refresh about 60 times a day. Those newspaper are old news in the morning and waste my time by reading the same content another time.

NRC Next provides in-depth articles and also covers topics that other newspapers do not cover like more Tech, Science and Philosophy. I like those topics in this paper because except from techcrunch.com I don’t really read about them, but they are actually the most important subjects in my life. NRC Next provides the most important “recent news” stories and than gets on to the good stuff.

Now, I think “old newspapers” are dying because of paper, because of the form and size they are printed on but also because they just provide “recent news”. All I see in most conventional newspapers is still the sum of stuff I’ve already read yesterday in my browser. They should cut that crap! Especially young internet-savvy people (25 and younger) already read those breaking news stories on the web. They get it trough sms, e-mail newsletters, blogs, RSS or refreshing newsportals 20 times a day. At least the more interested target group is interested in in-depth articles or articles about a not so well known topics: the niches. Most people tend to find content on niche blogs which are mostly amateur and the good ones are either popular and write about the same stuff from within a single standpoint or are hard to find.

I refresh techcrunch.com about 15 times a day because I won’t find that stuff in any newspaper.

So what would be the (or at least my) ideal newspaper?

My ideal newspaper is a newspaper where both journalists create but also just redact content. Professional journalists should have a moderation role over news and should add their own commentary about what they find. They should put together a newspaper with content from various sources and add their own content to it. Journalists are educated in filtering the crap articles and picking the right ones or the special ones. They can add some “recent news/breaking stories” articles, especially on bigger developing ones but they should but the crap with those small “a cat fell out of the tree and hit a car which caused a major accident”-kind of stuff. I already read that yesterday!

Also, I want to cut the paper out of newspaper. I have too many papers laying around all the time and I want to be able to view movies and stuff and listen to documentaries or audio clips while reading the articles. A device like the iPad would be ideal for this. I want to be able to drag, drop, click, view, interact, bookmark, sync and share the content the editors wrote and moderated for me. And I want to take my newspaper with me all the time and I want to be able to read it anywhere. And no, that doesn’t mean on a smartphone.

Have you seen the sizes of those screens? When reading a paper I scan, I look at the pictures beside it, I switch between articles etc. That’s just nog possible on the screen size of smart phone. A laptop? No. I don’t need a keyboard when reading the newspaper, I don’t want to open/close my lid every time I switch trains when commuting, talk to somebody at the office, go out lunch or just switch channels on my TV. I want it to “feel” like a traditional paper tabloid-size version so I can carry it around everywhere without fuzz.

So the last thing I would like to add that relates to content and realtime and carrying the device. Carrying the device with you DOES NOT mean that I want to update it all the time! When I get a lot of great articles in the morning I don’t want them to be lost in the stream all the news stories in the world. The professionals behind the paper can select and moderate them for me until I get my new newspaper release the next morning and leave out all the unimportant or boring stuff. The state should be maintained in every release. I want to be sure that when I wake up there is a great new digital and interactive release of that days paper and I want to be sure that it’s still there when I get home in the evening or go to lunch so I can read on where I left off.

I want a newspaper where content is moderated and written by professional journalists so I won’t have to do the moderation myself and check 2000 feeds every day. I want it to be interactive, be able to share and bookmark stuff. I want it to portable on a comfortable size. Not a phone size and not something sluggish like a laptop.

Finally I want the content to stay all day. I want to have that traditional newspaper feeling. In the evening, I want to have the traditional newspaper feeling that tomorrow there will be a great new newspaper release waiting for me to be consumed. I want to be sure that I’m never leaving any important piece behind and that the professional journalists will tell me the next day, if I do.

No, mainstream consumers are not ready for this yet, but I think they’re going to become very close in the next 2 – 4 years. I believe that in 6 years, everyone will be reading the news on an iPad-like device while commuting. And I believe this is currently the only way that non-internet-tech-journalist-savvy people can consume news in a better way.

At Firmhouse, we are working on a new web service and we’re releasing an in-development demo to everyone who is interested. Normally, in demo apps security is less the case and there is always some disclaimer that says you shouldn’t use real production data like passwords and API keys. In my opinion, this sucks because you allways want to use your real-life data to test a demo and see if it’s useful for you specifically. That’s why, the best way to have some security in your demo app is by using a self-signed SSL certificate to secure passwords and other sensitive account information your demo users will be adding.

For our web app, we use Ruby on Rails running on Phusion Passenger, served by Nginx.

This blog post will guide you trough the process of adding a self-signed SSL certificate to your Rails app, running on Phusion Passenger and Nginx by following these steps:

1. Generating the required SSL key and certificate files for use with nginx.
2. Recompiling the nginx server through the passenger-install-nginx-module command.
3. Configuring your web app in nginx to redirect non-secure connections to the secure address of the app with https:// and make sure www. will get redirected on both versions as well.

I use a few other blog posts in this article, so I would like to thank the authors for providing the information publicly and freely.

Ok, now let’s start:

1. Generating the required SSL key and certificate files

This step is largely taken from the Slicehost Articles: http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/12/19/ubuntu-gutsy-self-signed-ssl-certificates-and-nginx.

First of all, generate an SSL private key to sign your certificate with:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out myssl.key 1024

And enter a passphrase for the key which we will remove later on.

Now, we need to generate a Certificate Signing Request:

openssl req -new -key myssl.key -out myssl.csr

This command will ask you various questions. Fill them as you see fit. You can skip the extra attributes by just pressing enter when asked.

Now, we are going to remove the passphrase from your key by making a copy and then generating it back to the original file without entering a passphrase. You can do this with the following commands:

cp myssl.key myssl.key.org
openssl rsa -in myssl.key.org -out myssl.key
rm myssl.key.org

We now have a key file, and a csr file. We can use these to generate the actual SSL certificate with the following command:

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in myssl.csr -signkey myssl.key -out myssl.crt

We should now move these files to the SSL configuration directory on your host. On Ubuntu, this is /etc/ssl/certs and /etc/ssl/private. Do this with the following commands (assuming you use sudo):

sudo cp myssl.crt /etc/ssl/certs/
sudo cp myssl.key /etc/ssl/private/

All required SSL key and certificate files are in place so we can continue with the next section: preparing nginx to be SSL-enabled with the passenger-install-nginx-module command.

2. Recompiling the nginx server with the passenger-install-nginx-module command

By default, the passenger-install-nginx-module command does not enable the SSL compile option in the default installation steps. Here’s how to use the custom build step to configure nginx with SSL.

First of all, be sure you already have nginx installed with the passenger-install-nginx-module command because this will have downloaded the nginx source code in /tmp, which you will need to enter in the custom build steps. If you haven’t already done this, run:

sudo passenger-install-nginx-module

Press enter after you’ve read the introduction message and choose step one “Yes: download, compile and install Nginx for me” by pressing `1′. (recommended) when the installer asks for the install options.

After nginx has been compiled and installed you can now run the

sudo passenger-install-nginx-module

command again. Press enter after you’ve read the introduction message and choose step two “No: I want to customize my Nginx installation. (for advanced users)” by pressing `2′.

You are now asked for the directory of the Nginx source code. The recommended installer step should have downloaded and extracted the source code in /tmp/nginx-x.x.xx. At the time of writing, this was /tmp/nginx-0.7.64. So enter:

Where is your Nginx source code located?

Please specify the directory: /tmp/nginx-0.7.64

And press `Enter’.

The next question will ask you where you want to install Nginx to. The default is /opt/nginx. To leave it this way (I recommend this), just press `Enter’ again.

Now the installer will ask your for extra Nginx configure options as shown in the following screenshot.

Here you should add the --with-http_ssl_module argument which will make sure the configure script will enable the Nginx HTTP SSL module for compilation.

Extra arguments to pass to configure script: --with-http_ssl_module

The script will ask you for a confirmation if you really would like to modify the configure arguments. And yes, you would like to so press `Enter’ to confirm.

The script will now start to configure, compile and install Nginx in /opt/nginx.

Wait a few seconds or minutes for it to finish and continue to the next section: configuring Nginx to use the SSL certificate and create a secure connection for your Rails application.

3. Configure your Nginx to use the SSL certificate to secure the connection to your application

First of all, we will need to add a server block to the Nginx configuration so your application will listen on port 443 and use Phusion Passenger for serving your app. Open /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf and add the following block below everything else:

server {
    listen 443;
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/myssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/myssl.key;
    ssl_session_timeout 5m;
    ssl_protocols SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
    ssl_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP;

    server_name yourdomain.com;
    root /srv/apps/qloudwatch/current/public;

    passenger_enabled on;
    passenger_use_global_queue on;
}

Make sure you use yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com here (not both) for nice HTTP redirection to the correct domain name.

Now we need to configure that all non-secure request are redirected to the secure address of the web app. For example: all requests to http://yourdomain.com/ and http://www.yourdomain.com/ should be redirected to https://yourdomain.com.

To do this, add the following before the server section we just added:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.yourdomain.com yourdomain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) https://yourdomain.com$1 permanent;
}

Now, restart your Nginx server by calling `sudo killall nginx -HUP’. Wait a few moments for Nginx to launch and try http://yourdomain.com/ to see if everything works.

And that’s all! You have just generated a self-signed SSL certificate, installed Nginx with the SSL-module enabled and configured the domain with your web application to be reached trough SSL.

I understand this can be quite something to take in if you’re new to SSL and Nginx so if you have any questions, any questions at all about this or other web app deployment strategies please post a comment, contact me on Twitter (@michiels is my account) or send me an e-mail.

I know how you are, world
I know how you need to be.

That’s why I can’t get mad at you,
When you are sometimes so cruel to me.

I just liked this poem

This is a sneak preview screenshot of Cash Buddy. Cash Buddy is about tracking your personal cashflow. It helps you plan bills and expenses and let’s you keep track of what money is coming in and going out. Just to make you sure you won’t have to worry about your personal finances. What do you think?

Today TPB announced it would sell itself to the Global Gaming Factory X AB. This is great for the future of the open internet and might be a step forwards to open up the conservative big copyright watchers and media companies Here’s why:

• It shows commercial interest in an “illegal” practice started by a wide community of both regular people and people interested in protecting the openness of the internet.
• If I believe TPBs blogpost, the company buying the torrent site is not only interested in earning money, but also in keeping the site running in the philosophy as it started, but also find ways to maybe bring commercial methods of downloading the files linked to as torrents.
• The money will go into a foundation protecting the freedom of speach, freedom of information and openness of the internet.

Tonight I was working on an old Rails app which I upgraded to Rails 2.3.2. All code went fine and on my local Mac installation all worked perfect. When I tried to deploy to the live environment I got the following strange error:

undefined method `alias_method_chain’ for I18n::Backend::Simple:Class

At first, I thought this had something to do with new i18n stuff in Rails 2.3.2 and after half an hour of Googling I finally got the answer. ActiveSupport and ActiveRecord in Rails now require ruby-iconv to be installed. This is probably available in most installations – because there where only 2 pages of unhelpfull answers on Google – but it wasn’t on my production environment.

I hope this blogpost will save you some Googling and it will fix the undefined method `alias_method_chain’ for I18n::Backend::Simple:Class error message. Also this error can happen with the following message: undefined method `silence_warnings’ for main:Object.

So the solution is: install ruby-iconv. If you’re running FreeBSD, that’s in /usr/ports/convertors/ruby-iconv (via: http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-763.html)

Here’s a list of practical things I do to keep productive.

• Reset your mind every evening (especially before a work-day): go read a book an hour before you usually go to bed. Read it in your living room or somewhere where you can’t go to bed and can’t get to a computer. I like to do this at 11pm with a nice cup of tea.
• Have a healthy eating rhythm. By this I do not explicitly mean eat healthy food! Just have breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. Snacks are fine too, as long as you keep your 3-meals a day rhythm. I force to have breakfast the last few weeks and I’m feeling better already. If you’re like me and you hate having breakfast try something light like some fruit, cornflakes or yesterdays leftovers.
• Schedule your off-time. Don’t see relaxation as a reward for getting things done. Plan your relaxation so you know you will get things done after relaxing. If you don’t plan time to unstress, you never will. Also, it will make sure you don’t worry about relaxing because you know you can because you scheduled it.
• Don’t worry about finances. Make sure you have a system for keeping track of your finances so you won’t have to worry about them. This doesn’t stop you worrying from not having money to pay your bills but knowing you can’t pay them and finding out when you can pay them relieves stress about finances.
• Keep your inbox clean and actions organized. Just like with finances. You can relieve mental stress if you know what to do and when you’ve answered to all your running projects and tasks. It might be possible you can’t do every task you have but it helps knowing having actions you can’t do, rather than not knowing what to do with them. I just Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done system for this. Read his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity about this.