I’ve enjoyed rolling my own Rack server on Heroku. Yet, it always seemed to be a functional hack. Then I finally posed a seemly simple question. Why am I deploying to Heroku, what are the benefits? The reason I initial reason I was deplying to heroku for Jekyll plug-ins, beeing different, and the learning process. The only tangitable benefits hosting with Heroku offers me… crickets…wait I have the ability to control site routing via ModRewrite.

I don’t want to go dwell to much on the evolution of my online presence. For nearly two years this site has been built upon the awesomeness that is Jekyll. Over the two years I’ve learned a lot, I’ve also made may mistakes. I do feel in many ways Jekyll with GitHub is nearly a perfect platform for most users. Yet I wanted more and moved the hosting to Heroku. I had the inclination I still wanted more back in November when I started to ‘refactor’ the site design.

I’ve been putting of creating a plug-in that would take my images from flickr and embed them on pages here… was able to make a local working plug in fairly quicky. However, everytime I tried to push the site to heroku everything would fail with an error, Liquid Exception: No API key or secret defined! Well the solution was simple and I kept glossing over it heroku labs:enable user-env-compile Yes, thats right.

So I quickly learned CloudFlare isn’t for me as it add to much overhead for such a minimal ROI. Around the same time I noticed my Bootsrap base was no longer current, I stumbled upon jekyll-assets and bootstrap-sass which started to get me thinking why not use the two and customize it for my needs and serve it all up as one file. It works faily well, which then lead me to wonder if I should keep using Bootstrap or find something a bit lighter.

When I was spec-ing out a way to develop a site and return to the web my requirements where fairly simple. I wanted to avoid running or maintaining any of infrastructure. I first started using tumblr, moved to jekyll with github hosting, then to heroku. They are all fine options. I am however am finding, what I always knew, I enjoy the technical side far more than content creation. I think I’m getting close to setting sail on my time at heroku and take my toys to a bigger Digital Ocean.

Once again I’m taking inspiration from Jonas Forsberg and Deploy to Heroku from Github. However, I just couln’t get the thing to work. So I backtracked to the orginal project github-heroku-pusher and everything now seems to be in working order. I think I will circle back around to his method eventually, but for now, while I build out the site I’m going to follow the don’t fix what isn’t broken mantra.

Now that I have github -> heroku publishing in place now is the time to setup even more over kill, heroku offers a few (2)5 MB Memcache Bucket. I made the following changes to config.ru if memcache_servers = ENV["MEMCACHE_SERVERS"] require 'dalli' require 'rack-cache' require 'memcachier' $cache = Dalli::Client.new use Rack::Cache, :verbose => true, :metastore => $cache, :entitystore => $cache end To test that caching is working use ab aka Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool and run ab -n 500 -c 5 [hostname]

After playing with jekyll on Git Hub’s pages, I realized I needed something with a bit more zest. I needed plug-in support. I found Jonas Forsberg post entitled Jekyll + Heroku + Unicorn = Blazing fast blogging and basically followed the step outlined below. sudo gem install heroku sudo gem install bundler heroku auth:login git clone git@github.com:himynameisjonas/jekyll-heroku-unicorn.git cd jekyll-heroku-unicorn bundle install heroku create git push heroku master That lead to a complete fail.