A few months ago I got in contact with Adam Thorsen who owns the http://loglibrary.com domain. He used to host the log files for the #rubyonrails channel on it, but stopped doing due to lack of time / whatever. So I wrote a bot over a couple of weekends and a parser (later written in python) for the logs from radsaq’s logs. This was hosted through Adam’s contacts at EngineYard. EngineYard’s hosting was solid as and whenever there was an error they would contact us explaining what it was and how to fix it.

This all worked perfectly up until about a month ago when I started to receive “threats” that due to the global economic catastrophuck (thanks to Andy Wright for that word) I would have to start paying for the hosting on the EngineYard service. Also, the site I made for it wasn’t receiving a high enough volume. I have too many side projects (rboard, lookup and Ruby 1.9 compatibility to name a few) that I need to get rid of some. This is one of them. If someone else would like to take over the logging and site part of “logga” I would be more than happy to hand this over. From today until further notice I will be hosting the bot in “helpa”-mode on my slicehost until someone else steps up. Thanks for your support for this project.

Today marks 34 days since I wrote my post on Ruby 1.9.1. That has been the single most successful piece I have ever written and I’d like to thank those people who linked to it and those who have commented on it.

Now I must ask something of the community. We have this wonderful new version of Ruby to use and yet many of the gems we love to use are still broken. Why? Because the owners of the gems are lazy or simply cannot be bothered or do not want to spend the time to alter their gems to make them compatible with Ruby 1.9.*. There have been a few authors out there such as the Phusion Passenger guys (look how small that commit is!) who have added 1.9 compatibility to their gem and this is a show of how important they think the community is to the success of their product. They want the community to use 1.9 with their gem.

This is a call to action for those developers who have failed to release a 1.9 compatible version of their gem for some reason. There is no excuse. If you can’t do it, get someone else to do it. There’s this awesome service called github which is really handy when you want to share a project with the world and get people to submit stuff. If you don’t want to fix your gem, then fine. Other people will, in time. Hell, even I might fire up a few new repositories when things settle down with 1.9 compatibility for your hard work (and of course attempt to get my changes put back into mainstream). Who knows, I might even find fame through this!

Please, please, please! Update your gems. It’s not that hard and it’s setting the Ruby community on the path to full compatibility with 1.9. We don’t want to become like Internet Explorer.