Another Rails success story

11 May 2007

I got the green light to post up a couple of entries about a pretty good-size new Rails app that we've been working on for the past month or two. It's thenewsroom and it's sort of a browsing thingy for various bits of content. Once you find some stuff you like, you can "mash" it to your blog or web site or whatever. Then, when someone views the content on your blog (e.g., someone watches a video or something), the metadata for the video is being served via Apache+mod_proxy+balancer+Mongrel. Good times.

One neat thing about thenewsroom functionality-wise is that you can create a sort of saved search thingy called a "custom feed". For example, this blog entry holds the top Coast Guard videos that thenewsroom has at the moment. So I can leave this blog entry up and every time it's viewed it'll get the most recent stuff. Rather nifty. You can do the same thing for hockey or football or Iraq or whatever else you want to get the current news for.

We've seen the traffic more or less quintuple in the past two weeks, and it keeps getting busier, especially since sites like The Sports Network are starting to use the content. But we're nowhere even close to capacity.... lots of room to grow. Go Ruby, go Rails!