31–40 of 43 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you heard of Heroku? They were YC's largest exit to date largely due to solving exactly that problem! It doesn't get any easier than Heroku.
Heroku's great, but the cheapest plan they have is $36 a month. There are shared hosts out there that cost $1.99.
What a joke. Doesn't work on Windows. Fine, I'll buy that. Doesn't support IE. How hard is it to just use a good CSS Reset these days? We knew this wasn't going to kill Facebook, but it's not even going to get laughed at if only 2 people can use it.
One of the big disadvantages to using web frameworks like Rails or Django for open web applications is that the deployment is very tedious, at least compared with something like PHP. Something that requires having root access to a *nix server and takes 25 steps to install is never going to be mainstream - you need something that a 13-year-old could put up on a shared hosting account (i.e. phpBB) to really get tractio…
I deploy django+myapp+modules in to a virtualenv[1] without any permissions other than default user perms in a Unix box. The only 'tricky' bit is setting up the database, that requires more permissions (and for good reasons). It's completely possible to make to make it simple in any language. I agree with the point that currently the Diaspora installion instructions are a bit excessive though. [1]- http://pypi.python…
For those who aren't aware of the issues[0] that were revealed several months ago, Diaspora's devs made some rudimentary security mistakes. Yes, it's an alpha, but as pointed out in the HN thread (which I did not save, and am too lazy to search for), this was basic security - the stuff you have to keep in mind from the start, not stick on later.
[0]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...
At least the instructions are thorough. Someone with a small amount of system admin knowledge could probably get it up and running. They could have just gave a short explanation that only anyone who does develops web apps or system admins all the time would understand.
Please trust me when I say, the instructions available today are vastly better then the state of play when they initially released; if you didn't have some Rails experience going into it at the time, you were probably not the target audience. ;)
What an improvement over the tedious Java version which would run with "java -jar diaspora.jar" (or a double click on Mac/Windows)!
I didn't realize that Java now comes with MySQL and a Redis server bundled.