Wow, I’ve received a ton of fan mail over my Rails Is A Ghetto rant. So much that I’ve decided to contact everyone and say thanks and actually reply. Then I may contact a few people to ask if I can include their questions in a larger FAQ of sorts.

I actually only received 1 hate mail, and maybe three that were on the fence. I find that astounding since all the blog-moron-focusing-devices like slashdot seemed to be full of nothing but scorn and mild ridicule. Man, slashdot ain’t what it used to be.

Don’t forget the Factor hack fest tomorrow at 7pm @ Earth Matters on 175 Ludlow St. I’ll be there and a few others and I’ll go over the 50 most important words (and how you get them with a single line of Factor code).

If you wrote me an email and I haven’t responded then just give me a day or two. It was around 400 emails and I still have like 300 to go.

One guy sent me an email that made my mail client prompt me for a password in a weird way. Still trying to figure out how he forged the headers to do that, but thanks for trying the hack man.

Finally, some people have asked me how my site survived a redditing, a techcrunching, and a slashdotting plus all the other hits. It’s very simple:

I don’t run Rails. I actually use another very nice Ruby project called webgen that generates the entire site, blog, feeds and all that offline, and then I rsync it onto a tiny 256M VM donated by RailsMachine This is then served up by nginx as pure static content.

The most important point is my little VM didn’t break a sweat during the whole thing. My nginx didn’t use more than about 4M ram the whole time and I only had one worker going.

That’s how you do it boys and girls. I’ll have a more detailed blog post with stats this weekend for everyone who’s interested in getting a similar setup.

Have fun!