neal street design

Using Hoptoad for Share Astronomy

Ken Hudson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:13:24 +0000

Our new application - Share Astronomy - was written with Ruby on Rails. Many Rails developers use the exception_notifier plugin for exception handling. We decided to use the Hoptoad hosted service instead. So far, we are extremely pleased.

One of the primary advantages of Hoptoad is that we only receive an email once when there’s an error rather than receiving duplicate emails every time the same error occurs. Hoptoad also has a very slick user interface that lets you inspect the value of all parameters, view your session data, scroll through the backtrace, etc. And, to top it off, it’s very affordable - ranging from free to $25/month depending on features and functionality.

Installation and setup was easy:

First, if you have exception_notifier, you must remove it.

Next, from your project’s RAILS_ROOT you run the following command:

script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/hoptoad_notifier.git

Then, in the config/initializers/hoptoad.rb file you should have something like this:

HoptoadNotifier.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = '12aa34567bbcc8901dddeeef'
end

More detailed instructions (including the steps necessary to remove exception_notifier) can be found on the Hoptoad Github site.

Finally, there are other exception notification services out there. One example would be Exceptional. I don’t have any experience with Exceptional, though, so I can’t provide a comparison.

Ruby on Rails Application Monitoring Tools

Ken Hudson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:45:42 +0000

My father used to say, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Hmmm… I hope he was wrong. In any case, I had good intentions when I wrote my previous blog post. I really was going to try and write blog posts frequently. Unfortunately, in my mad dash to get the first phase of our new application done I focused totally on coding and blogging fell by the wayside. Well, my intentions are good again and I’m really, really going to try to keep up with these posts.

Today we released our new web application - Share Astronomy. I’ll let you read all about it on the web site itself. However, I did want to use a couple posts to talk about some of the technology.

One of the most important decisions we had to make during development was what tools to use for application monitoring. The tools we chose were:

Hoptoad for exception reporting.
Pingdom to track uptime.
New Relic for monitoring application performance problems
Google Analytics to measure website traffic among other things.

Are these the “best” choices? To be honest, I’m not sure yet. Time will tell and I’ll share the good, the bad and the lessons learned as things progress. In my next post I’ll talk about our experiences so far with Hoptoad. The next post will be soon. Really.

We have a new web site!

Ken Hudson — Sun, 24 May 2009 23:52:06 +0000

Welcome to our new web site. Yes, it was finally time to ditch our old, antiquated web site and move to something that accurately reflects our business. Please visit the About page for more information on Neal Street Design, Inc. Refer to this space frequently to read about:

Our latest project - a new and very exciting web application aimed at anyone interested in astronomy, astrophysics and space science
Our experiences developing web applications for others
Ruby on Rails lessons learned
Database design and development
Any other topics that strike our fancy

We’ve learned a lot from many of you - now it’s our turn to pass on some knowledge!