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Did 37signals have any direct involvement in this, other than of course the Amazon Web Services team using the Ruby on Rails framework?

Does 37signals = the new Amazon Web Services team :)

Don’t seem to be working too well, do it?

This is very intriguing indeed….

They aren’t even using resources. Ugly URL rendering. F- from Amazon.

“Application error (Rails)”

Hmmm. Probably spoke too soon, eh?

I get “Application error (Rails)” right now. :-)

Doh!

Does it’s job very well at crashing

Eh…rails error? Wow, at least that makes me feel like I’m not the only one.

Guess they didn’t get those scalability requirements set yet…what with that big fat nasty error and all.

Maybe an Amazon EC2 could have been used to avoid the Rails application error.

That’s because Jeff Bezos is your kind of guy.

Talking about Bezos, I’m curious to know why he isn’t listed on the sidebar under the “Who are 37signals?”.

Nonetheless, you gotta love both Bezos and 37signals.

If the Almost Effortless scenario is correct, what happens with TextDrive? Or is that rumor/idea completely off base?

Sheesh . . . yuk. Usability and design bite.

Congrats to the Rails team. While I do not think that making Rails corporate-gauntlet friendly should be a primary goal of the Rails core team, it is great to see that people in large companies can move it through the “enterprise” approval process. Good job 37s and Amazon (and Bezos)! [Now if only I could get my hands on some EC2 , I’d be an even bigger fan]

Sorry guys, just not enjoying the Kool-Aid as much nowadays. Why does Rails need a full stack (lighttp, memcached, etc.) just to be useful on the web? And it seems pretty finicky. Amazon can’t get it to run all the time? The RoR wiki was down for like a month a while back, with a Rails Error. I mean, for people just learning it, sure, that’s reasonable, but does php.net or java.sun.com crash and burn with an incomprehensible error message, ever?

Launch days always have problems. As long as Unspun’s not regularly down, it seems like a pretty good example of the mainstreaming of Rails.

Someone should have told them that you’re allowed to create Rails applications that don’t have a graduated blue-to-white fade at the top! ;-)

Why do people think that TextDrive are the official Ruby on Rails host? Our company pays for their business hosting and they never reply to our support emails. Their attitude of killing FCGI processes without warning or notification is unacceptable when running a production site. I only wish the Amazon rumours were true, meanwhile we’re looking for a more Rails ‘sympathetic’ host. It would be interesting to know what stack UnSpun are using.

Still seems to be screwed.

“We’re Sorry! UnSpun is temporarily unavailable. Thanks for your patience.”

Nice comment spam, btw.

garth: Not sure if by “textdrive” you mean “shared hosting at textdrive” but anyone who is running a real production site on shared hosting is going to have problems, whether its textdrive or anyone else. If you have a site with real clients that, go with a vps or dedicated.

And their biz plans must be some sort of “shared less” plan -> http://textdrive.com/faqs/17

btw – Rimuhosting (rimuhosting.com) has been great for me – top notch xen virtualization, and support is very good.

Thanks Rob, we’ve just gone with Rimuhosting. They should be able to grow with our Rails hosting requirements.

Just thinking… It may be in Jeff Bezos’ best interests to give 37s a little limelight?

For the record, the problem yesterday was not caused by rails, but rather a faulty deployment of only part of our code which explains why the default framework message came up instead of our custom page.

The second “temporary” outage early this morning was a planned outage that lasted 20 minutes.

Garth 30 Nov 06 Why do people think that TextDrive are the official Ruby on Rails host?

Probably because on the Ruby website it says, “If you need hosting, TextDrive is the official Ruby on Rails host.” :)

C’est la vie!

37 Signals had to be involved. UnSpun is such a creative, clean simple product. I can’t see how they where not involved. 37 Signals UnSpun

Try harder…

“37 Signals had to be involved…they “stumbled” across this while working on Amazon Mechanical Turk.”

Came out different than I wanted to. I changed it to “I find it interesting how the Amazon Team “stumbled” across this new idea while working on a Amazon Mechanical Turk project. ”

I am still making the point that UnSpun is so clean and creative that it might as well have come from 37 Signals.

Lets vote for RoR and make it no.1 open source project here: http://www.grupthink.com/topic/821

First, long time reader, first time commentator. Huge fan of 37 Signals. As always, keep on inspiring people.

I have to say Unspun has freaked me out a bit.

Not because it’s a fascinating site and an amazing use of Mechanical Turk, but for the simple fact that it’s so close in idea/execution to my site that I soft launched just last Friday, tenspotting.com which collects and aggregates social top ten lists and allows users to share both their individual list and the communities.

Both sites collect info from users. Both sites allow users to create lists of whatever they might like. However, I do not have thousands of people working for me via Amazon’s MT. It’s kind of hard for a bootstrapper to compete against that.

However, I do believe that making lists on my site might be more fun. And I guess that’s probably how I’ll have to differentiate it over time.

Either way, it’s an amazing experience for me to have launched the site and to see it up and running as a first time web entrepreneur.

If anyone in this thread is interested in checking it out, I’d love to hear what you think. It’s early and kinda ugly but it works at a very base level. Launch early and often right?

Yours,

Gavin Purcell www.tenspotting.com

Application Error

We’re sorry, you’ve experienced an application error.

Help us fix this problem by telling us what you were doing when this error occurred.

“Loading your main page.” As of 12/3 12:23am EST .

An easy answer to that “ultimate ROR host” question I guess.

Pretty sweet. Stuff I’d like to see in it:

1) the ability to embed, say, the top 10 from a category in a web page 2) browse page with categories 3) more transparent explanation of the numbers and voting rules