You can see what it looks like in this photo.

Go go go!

My dashed-off reply seemed worthy of sharing when I reviewed it. Here it is:

Hi [REDACTED]—

Since you’ve seemed open to hearing my opinions, I’ll offer a few more. ;]

Read this article if you didn’t get the chance yet:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/higher-pricing.html

Especially relevant here is the concept of attracting the kinds of customers that you want to be able to sell to later. Customers who join for free will continue to expect you to offer services for free. Freemium services around the web have conversions-to-paid of 1-2% (for the good ones!), which means you need to support A LOT of free users before you get the conversions needed to pay the bills.

Marketing to consumers is exponentially harder than marketing to businesses. If you can tell a business that you can save them $X or help them earn $Y faster, then they would be foolish to not pay you just a bit less than X or Y.

With consumers, you are operating against powerful forces of apathy and unconcern. It’s the kind of thing that massive marketing firms try to crack with million dollar war chests. They take their best shots by trying to make brands look cool or sexy. Do you have a marketing strategy strong enough to sway these forces in the numbers required to fill your freemium funnel? It takes big guns.

What steps did you take to measure or estimate the cost of acquiring a new business customer vs acquiring a new paying consumer customer?

Let me know if you’d like me to run a workshop for your team on pricing. ;] Maybe this is what we should do the next bootstrappers meetup on. It really is crucial to successful bootstrapping…

—brook

The really short version

Generate a new rails app based on a simple template that sets up Haml out of the box (and some other nice optional features).

rails new ProjectName -m https://raw.github.com/RailsApps/rails3-application-templates/master/rails3-haml-html5-template.rb

The lazy one works the hardest

I’m spinning up a new Rails app, and went looking for a shortcut to make Rails use Haml automatically for the html templates. Well, you know what they say about lazy people working hard. Sure enough, I couldn’t find a fast answer, but did find some tools to make sure I have a ready-to-roll shortcut for next time. I’m happy to share it with you now!

No built-in default to Haml

Rails 3.1 got CoffeeScript to beautify the .js files and Sass to tame stylesheet wasteland by default, but the html templates are left in the dark ages of angled brackets and irrelevant whitespace. The paucity of good google results and a few StackOverflow questions and answers made it clear that Rails doesn’t have a built in way to generate a new app with default Haml view templates. Convert the application layout by hand? Eww! Manually add the haml-rails gem? Not in 2012, no sir!

Luckily, my goal is accomplished easily enough with a little one-time elbow grease up front.

Rails app templates

Rails has long had ways of creating apps based on templates. Various methods of using these templates have sprung up, but there is one that appears to canonical for new Rails projects.  This handful of starter templates based on the inclusion of hand-picked, standardized “recipes” jumpstarts some great standard app patterns. But these offer more than what I’m looking for at the moment.

The new project I want to create will start as a simple static page, and grow from there. I don’t want to make decisions about user authentication or test suites or NoSQL stores yet. I just want a nice clean Rails app, that uses Haml. Ok, fine, I also want it to use twitter-bootstrap-sass.

Easy enough! My desired options are a subset of the more complicated recipes, so I can create my own based on what’s been done before. Away we go with the modern dev cycle: Fork, tweak, test, push, verify, pull request. Good times.

This new recipe, just like the other recipes, gives the user-selectable options (Haml or ERB? Which CSS framework? Other minor niceties), but allows me to keep my app simple for now.

To use it, just run the `rails new…` command above. But do I really want to remember that long command if this is what I want to start with every time?

Power to the .railsrc

Thanks to a little hidden feature of Rails 3.2, we can make a template like this the default whenever the `rails new …` command is run. Just add the relevant switches and options to a .railsrc file in your home directory.

# ~/.railsrc
-m https://raw.github.com/RailsApps/rails3-application-templates/master/rails3-haml-html5-template.rb

Now, the template (and any other options you might want to throw in  [see `rails --help` for the full list]) will be applied every time I run `rails new ProjectName`.

Sweet, now I get to be lazy at last!

Now show me yours

What would you want to see in your default starter Rails app template?

Bring it on, March!

I’m not a productivity guru.
I don’t follow the GTD system.
I can’t really pomodoro.
I lose track of my paper lists.

But this keeps me focused on what I need to do, every day:
“Don’t Break The Chain” Goal Tracker

It works for me. It might work for you. Give it a try, and let me know.

Other issues you might run in to:

• Heroku reports “No such file or directory – php-cgi”: I hit this when I included a Gemfile that contained rack-legacy. Restricting it to the :development group enabled me to get to the next error…
• App dies, and Heroku logs say “can’t find executable rackup”: Looks like WP on Heroku just doesn’t want to work with anything in the gemfile. Deleting Gemfile and Gemfile.lock from the repo, and adding both to .gitignore got the app going again on Heroku. Any ideas why this is happening? I’d love to hear a better work-around.
• Pow reports: “LoadError: cannot load such file — rack-legacy” (or just rack). It seems to me a newer version of RVM caused Pow to not get the right gemset. There are lots of suggested fixes, but this one is what worked for me (followed by .gitignore’ing my .powenv file, which is the right behavior anyway).

Heroku is a great service, and simply the best way to quickly deploy small apps into a production environment. I usually use it for Ruby on Rails apps, but every now and then, a WordPress installation is more suited for a particular project. Now that Heroku supports php, WP can be deployed to the cloud in just a few steps.

Caveat: Without zlib, Heroku’s php platform is unable to handle the installation or upgrading of themes or plugins, so those tasks need to be managed in a local development environment, and pushed to production via Heroku’s slick git deployment. It’s inconvenient, but I’m working on some tools to make it smoother. Once you are up and running, see the followup post for details about what’s required.

Here’s the step by step tutorial for getting a WordPress.org installation running on Heroku’s Cedar stack.

1. Create GitHub repo
2. Then create local repo with GitHub as the upstream for origin. Basically like it says on the new repo page:

1. cd REPO-NAME

2. mate README.markdown # Create the readme file... use your favorite editor. Put in something informative

3. git add .

4. git remote add origin git@github.com:brookr/REPO-NAME.git

5. git push -u origin master

3. Download the latest wp.org source into your local repo.
1. The zip download will extract contents into a ‘wordpress’ folder
2. move the contents of that folder into your repo dir.
4. Create a heroku server on the Cedar stack

1. gem install heroku # If you don't have it already. Use `sudo` if you aren't using RVM

2. heroku create --stack cedar --remote production

3. heroku rename REPO-NAME # Or call it whatever you like for your project

4. Verify that the production remote in .git/config was update with the new name
5. Configure the heroku server with some handy free add ons:

1. heroku addons:add stillalive:basic

6. Most importantly, add a MySQL database option. There are 2 possibilities. Let’s try ClearDB, as the pricing scales better for low-volume sites:

1. heroku addons:add cleardb:ignite # Adds the MySQL option to the Heroku app's config

2. heroku config # See the URLs for your new databases

3. heroku config:add DATABASE_URL=mysql://... # Replace the "mysql://..." with the URL from CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL

7. Configure WordPress
1. Set WP to connect to your database, by replacing the contents of wp-config-sample.php with this:

   if (isset($_SERVER["DATABASE_URL"])) {
    $db = parse_url($_SERVER["DATABASE_URL"]);
    define("DB_NAME", trim($db["path"],"/"));
    define("DB_USER", $db["user"]);
    define("DB_PASSWORD", $db["pass"]);
    define("DB_HOST", $db["host"]);
   }
   else {
    die("Your heroku DATABASE_URL does not appear to be correctly specified.");
   }

2. Update the secret key section of the config with settings from: https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/
3. Add some deployment-awareness, so links will work locally as well as in production:

• define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] );

4. Rename the file with git:

• git mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

• git commit -am "Initial config file reading heroku ENV"

8. Deploy!

• git push production master

9. Congrats, you are up and running! You can now configure your site:

1. heroku open

2. Enter info for the Site and initial admin user

Now you gotta get your local dev environment setup. Here’s how I did it, using the POW web server.

Don’t break the chain, February version, is now available. Download the PDF, and get to work on your top 3 goals for the month: 2012-02-chained_goals

Last month went pretty well for me. The chain definitely motivates. Here’s a view on what this contraption looks like assembled:

I am speaking, of course, of the outdated practice of installing Ruby gems to the system, which has been replaced by the method of installing gems using RVM and Ruby-version- and project-specific gem sets. Hooray, RVM! Hooray, bundler! Such has been particularly important for my current, local dev environment, on which I must run multiple apps on different versions of Ruby & Rails.

Okay, first: I currently have 12.79 GB available on my disk. Let’s not get started on the size of my music directory.

Now, let’s uninstall all “sudo” installed system gems:

$ rvm use system && sudo gem list --no-versions | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a

What does this command do?  “rvm use system” guarantees that the subsequent command is executed in the system ruby context. I want to uninstall system gems, not the gems used by any specific project or gem set.

“sudo gem list –no-versions” outputs a list of all installed Ruby gems, which is then piped “|” to “xargs sudo gem uninstall -a” as arguments. Each will be uninstalled in turn. You won’t miss them.

Some gems seems to not like this chaining, and report:

ERROR: While executing gem ... (NoMethodError)
 undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass

If you run the command again, the uninstall will pick up where it left off and continue uninstalling.

I check my free disk again: 14.05 GB available. WHUT. Nice: I just uninstalled 1.25 GB of unused gems.

And now, I’ve developed an easy way for you to do the same, in a handy 3-goal real-world desk-topper version:

Three-way habit builder for January.

If you are serious about a resolution, you need to work hard to actively create or modify a habit. Writing down your goals, tracking your efforts, and keeping it on your mind are proven methods for doing so.

Print out the pdf, write in three goals you want to work on daily, and start growing your chain. It folds neatly (try it–it’s pretty cool) to sit on your desk to keep your goals in front of you and answer the question “What should I be working on?” whenever you need it.

I’ll make a version for every month, so check back here at the end of January, and see what kinds of chains you can produce in 2012!

And please do share: What goals are you pursuing this month?

 UPDATE:

Get the latest monthly calendar here: May 2012

1. Find the service under your home folder, ~/Library/Services.
2. Right click on the service you want to modify, and choose Show Package Contents.
3. In the window that opens, look into the “Contents” folder.
4. You should see an info.plist file, which you can open in the text editor of your choice
5. Change the existing string (in the NSMenuItem -> “default” section) to whatever you like.
6. Save and close the file, and the new Service menu option should now be visible with the updated name.