Well, I finally succeeded in moving RVHobo from FatCow to RailsPlayground. RVHobo is now LIVE on new host!

I want to give all readers an idea of how to monitor a large number of websites for new posting without actually having to visit the website.

Have you heard of RSS Feeds? Anytime you see the orange icon (as seen above in the Firefox address bar),you can add the webpage to your RSS Reader and easily know when a new post is available.

Spent much of this afternoon moving RVHOBO.COM from the web hosting server from FatCow.com to RailsPlayground.com.

My http://rvhobo.com website hosting contract expires this month and when it jumped from $48.00/yr last year to $100.00 this year, I told them then I would find another host, which I did. I selected http://railsplayground.com because they have RUBY which I am struggling to learn.

Last year I purchased the ebook "Rails Testing Prescriptions", worked with it for awhile and let it fall by the wayside....Today, I was going through some old files and found the old PDFs, so I went to the website and downloaded the most recent, updated copy.

I started working on learning Unit Testing (BDD) using the book as a guide. I was going along reasonably fine until I suddenly hit a brick wall -- my testing suites disappeared! I kept receiving "empty test suite" whenever I ran my rails tests. I switched from RubyMine to NetBeans and had the same problem with both IDEs. I deleted the '.git' file to remove git version control -- all to no avail.

Now that I have my Ruby script working well enough to download mp3s from the website, I wanted to 'do it backwards' and add some tests. I spent numerous hours today researching the various test frameworks, unit-test, rspec, shoulda, etc.

BDD is when the developer first writes the test, has it fail and then writes and changes the actual code until the test passes. It takes more work to develop a program this way, but BDD has numerous benefits, including being able to re-run the test anytime a change is made to the program. If all the tests pass, one knows that everything is as good as it was before the changes were made. If failures, change and make new tests so that the actual code can be changed/created to fix the problem.

After I finally had the Ruby website scraping script running, I inadvertently deleted some code and had to figure out what I needed to redo. After adding the code again, I started having problems because one of my link requests was too general and captured several links which I wanted only a specific one which contained the name of the mp3 file to download.

I worked on it until I was too tired to think clearly, put the computer in sleep mode and went to bed myself. After eating breakfast, I worked on an improved link finding method and it took me until after lunch to find something the reliably worked.

The last few days I've been working on developing a Ruby-based script which will download mp3s from a site which I am a member of, but don't want to MANUALLY download several years of mp3 files....I used 'mechanize' with 'nokogiri' for the main script and then I was stumped on how to download the actual mp3 file, including directing it to a specific subdirectory. I searched the web and finally found the wget program which allows background downloading, i.e. system("wget -r -l 1 http://computeralchemist.com").

Several days ago, a gentleman bought a new Acer netbook and asked if I would install Ubuntu Linux on it. I declined and then he offered to pay some money for the task, so I said that I would do it for him.

I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Remix Netbook 9.10 ISO and created a self-booting USB stick with the image. It hiccuped several time when booting, but we finally ironed out the problems, except for the wireless connection. Since I do not have access to a 'hard wired' CAT5 cable LAN network, I have to work with a wireless connection.....Suddenly, I remembered that WinXP came with a network bridge built-in, so on my Fujitsu laptop, I 'bridged' the wireless to the LAN adapter and connected the CAT5 cable to the Acer Aspire One laptop. I was then able to download the BroadCom wireless drivers and when I rebooted, the wireless worked! Quite a saga -- a successful conclusion after many twists and turns.

Have had a trial trying to get a WYSIWYG editor working in Drupal 7. Seems that the capability is not yet implemented in the current pre-beta Drupal 7 software. I can live without it, but it is something that I've gotten used to and miss it when it's not there.

I finally was able to get Apache Mod_Rewrite working so that when someone enters 'http://computeralchemist.com', they will be automatically redirected to 'http://computeralchemist.com/computeralchemist'. I wanted the Drupal blog to exist in a subdir because it makes the website much cleaner with files in subdirectories rather than in the root.