spacing hack
Yesterday, my buzzword-compliant list for wickedwx grew to include:
I got a VPS account on December 31st because I was eligible for 2 months free if I signed up by the end of the year. I didn't need the VPS at the time, but I figured I would definitely need it at some point to make signing up then (and wasting it for the time being) worthwhile.
And a side note to anyone facing a similar situation: if you delete the VPS, you should get a service credit back on your account. To spell that out for my situation, that means I would've had 3 full months' worth of service starting yesterday, instead of just barely over 2.
Anyhow. I've now got experience with deploying a Sinatra app on a full blown VPS. This was only my second experience with deploying a Ruby app (the first one was deploying a Rails app in the last hour and a half of the Rails Rumble - total mistake to start so late).
The good news/bad news is that I now have no excuse for NOT implementing the remaining functionality that will allow me to replace the current wickedwx.com page that's hosted on Google App Engine.
I'm ecstatic to be moving off of App Engine. It can be a great place to get an app going, but its limitations like the proprietary nosql datastore and the lack of the ability to run any extensions written in C mean that you're NOT able to ask the right question, which is "What is the best solution to this problem?" but instead "What do I think I could actually get to run on App Engine?".
And for many other reasons, I've decided to move away from Google in general. After reading John August's On Google, and evil, I finally decided to see if I could actually cut the cord on the Google product I use the most: SEARCH. I switched to DuckDuckGo and so far, I'm happy. Their killer feature (for me) is something I didn't even know about when I switched, which is !bangs. It allows me to be lazy and type things like "!amazon " or "!imdb " and go directly to those site's search results.
So yeah, to get back to the point, the beta wickedwx.com is now well on its way to becoming the main wickedwx site and I get to breathe a sigh of relief that the project survived the thing that you should never do: which was to rewrite it from scratch.
YMMV