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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I spent almost an entire day doing this today, and in the course of getting documentation the traditional Rails way -- Googling for blog posts from 2007 and finding what changed right after it took the site down -- got a little frustrated. To vent a bit, I wrote it up cookbook-style so that someone in 2014 can curse my name.

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At least you have a date on your article. Half the articles I find have no date, and so then you're left wondering, 'exactly how out-of-date is the information I just found?'

I hate that. It really perplexes me when things pretending to be News Papers leave off dates.

I was surprised to see Tim Ferriss advocating something like this in the video of his that was posted over the weekend.

That is one of the best actionable pieces of advice I have ever seen him give, because the vast majority of his work, and well thought blog posts on nontechnical topics, is evergreen: it continues to be worthwhile years after publication. The preference for the new because it is new is irrational, and the constant content treadmill aping newspapers (who need it because they have a new paper to put out every day to wrap ads around) is a terrible idea for most bloggers. Ditto for those of us who do publishing for our businesses.

I agree, and I'm not advocating that everyone should always have a date on every piece of content they produce. Rather, one should think rationally about whether or not a specific piece of content will age well or not, and date it appropriately. In my opinion code tutorials and how-to's do not age well.

It may be actionable, but it's also user-hostile.

And you place the date at the top, so we don't have to scroll down an indefinite amount and maybe find one, maybe not. :-)

My one and old Rails app is running using Apache + Passenger. When I set it up, I wanted to get it using SSL site wide as easily as possible, so I just stuck in a rewrite rule in Apache:

  RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

It's been a year since I did that, but I think that's what I used to force the entire site into https only requests.

Well someone in 2010 is extremely grateful for your effort.

I don't understand why you go through the trouble of letting Mongrel/Rails handle the SSL. I've always opted to just let Apache handle it and I don't doubt nginx could just as well. Our Passenger simply doesn't know that everything between client and server happens to be encrypted.

nginx has a SSL module[1], so you could do that. Just redirect all traffic coming to port 80 to https[2]. But he might have had a good reason to handle it in Mongrel.

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpSslModule

[2] Add this to your config: server { listen 80; server_name example.com; rewrite ^/(.*) https://example.com/$1 permanent; }

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