As you could probably guess, my blog (and several sites of my friends) are hosted on a lovely Linux VPS provided by Linode.  I honestly can’t say enough nice things about the service and reliability I’ve received from Linode (and no they don’t pay me to speak highly of them!).  But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point is actually quite simple:  My VPS doesn’t have a lot of memory, and I’m always wary of my resource consumption.  A few months ago, I moved from Apache to lighttpd for this reason, alone.  Let’s face it… Apache is a memory hog, and that problem...

Over the past couple days I’ve been reading what’s shaping up to be an excellent book about Ruby on Rails called “Agile Web Development with Rails (Third Edition).”  This book takes a practical approach to teaching Rails by building a demonstration shopping cart application called “Depot.”  I must say that, so far, learning Rails has been a complete pleasure.  I really enjoy the MVC methodology and the idea of “convention over configuration.”  The basic idea behind Rails is that we (as web developers) generally know what we’re doing, and we can follow some...