How does Radiant help you make a living

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
#1

Hi everybody,

I’ve been quite busy at work lately working on an implementation of
Ektron’s
.Net
CMS. And wishing that I was using Radiant. And wishing that I had more
time to work on my Page Attributes extension, and wishing that I had
more
time to put together and submit an irresistible patch to bring facets
-like
functionality into trunk. (and versioning, and and write an in-place
editing
extension, etc… etc…)

Anyway, I was wondering, how do the rest of you do it? Are most of you
contractors implementing Radiant for some small client? Are you using
Radiant for your own personal Blog? Are you implementing Radiant for
free
for a friends site (like I am)? Basically, what’s your collective
advice on
how I could get paid to work with Ruby on Rails and specifically Radiant
full-time.

thanks,
Jacob

#2

I use radiant as the standard platform for customers, mainly small
businesses, who need their web presence revamped. For more specific
needs I resort to developing new rails apps or to other platforms
(drupal :frowning: )

2007/5/9, Jacob B. [email protected]:

#3

I am self-employed using primarily Ruby on Rails for new work. I use
either Radiant or Drupal for most new websites that require a CMS.
These websites are a mix between in-house websites and client
websites. My clients are typically small businesses who do not care
what technology is used as long as it works and is cost-efficient.
So, if you’re looking to go full-time, there’s plenty of opportunities
to do so. In fact, I had to quit taking new clients within 6 months
of becoming self-employed.

Best of luck!

#4

Jonathan: That is partly the point of ‘instance mode’. You can
install the gem system-wide, and only check out the minimum of files
when you need a new site. Extensions currently have to be installed
in every instance you create, however.

Back On-Topic:

I do Rails development full-time for a San Francisco-based startup
(even though I live in KC). I came to Radiant first for personal use,
then for a website redesign at my last job. It was at that job that I
got involved in the mental branch and developing extensions because we
needed slightly more than a static site. So for a while, I was paid
salary to work on Radiant, which was cool. In the process, I came up
with 4-6 patches that John accepted and then he asked me to join the
core team. Since being on the core team I have gotten requests for
Radiant-based projects coming in.

That’s not to say you need to be on the core team to get projects;
what I would suggest is this:

Work hard on a personal or pro-bono project if you can’t get a paid
one. Get intimate with the Radiant source. Develop extensions. Find
bugs, submit patches that fix them. Contribute to the mailing list,
IRC channel, and development wiki. Suggest Radiant to clients whose
needs match its strengths. Be passionate about what you do.

Cheers,

Sean

#5

I am a French freelance webmaster and I would love to setup Radiant for
all
my clients but the main blocker is the English admin. How could I
translate
the admin without touching the code base? Is this possible as an
extension?

Also, I would like to have only one install of Radiant and its
extensions,
but have multiple virtual hosts using it. But not as the Virtual Host
extension does: I want each website to use a different database so each
clients do not share the same admin! How should I do that? An extension
selecting the appropriate database according to the domaine name?

Thanks,
Jonathan

#6

Great testimonial, Sean.

I would like to go further on the two questions I asked, and as they are
off
topic, I will start news threads for them. Thanks.

Jonathan

#7

We are actually wanting to use Radiant more and more and are looking
for a full-time Ruby/Radiant developer. If anyone is based in/near
Powys/Shropshire in the UK then do get in touch.

-Karl

#8

On May 10, 2007, at 8:57 AM, Sean C. wrote:

Work hard on a personal or pro-bono project if you can’t get a paid
one. Get intimate with the Radiant source. Develop extensions. Find
bugs, submit patches that fix them. Contribute to the mailing list,
IRC channel, and development wiki. Suggest Radiant to clients whose
needs match its strengths. Be passionate about what you do.

+1

aiwilliams

#9

Just an update to whom may be interested

I offloaded the images to a separate subdomain that does not fall under
the control of the dispatcher (I know, I could have used .htaccess for
it,
but I’d prefer this method anyways) - Site’s speeding up now; It is
still
creeping the memory and CPU usage, but not as bad (It’s usable at
least.)

I’m going to offload the stylesheet from Radiant shortly as well, and
set
up .htaccess a little better.

Any ideas why this would do this to the memory usage?

#10

Well, I got to talking to a Dreamhost rep, saying that my ‘website’ is
leaking memory badly. I found it hard to believe, but with my site
issues
steadily worsening, I checked out ps aux and logged some rough stats. I
know my host kills when I get to a total of 200MB memory usage, or hard
memory runs. FastCGI is set up as 5 dynamic on Dreamhost as well.
Watching
my memory, it does climb, and rather fast; In some cases it manages to
peak my memory usage up to 800+MB total spread among the 5
dispatch.fcgis
before Dreamhost managed to can my processes. All the while, these
processes creep up to 80-90% CPU usage. This cycles every few minutes
right now. I am getting only about 800-1000 pageviews a day. I am in
production mode (I checked a few times) so this shouldn’t be happening,
or
so I would think. I am really stuck; I tried last night by rebuilding my
entire gem, rails, and radiant install, as well as rebuilding my entire
instance to no avail.

I’m about to offload all my non-radiant files (Including stylesheet and
images) to another subdomain so that they are direct access, hoping this
may help with my issues.

Could it possibly be a memory leak issue?

Your help would be wonderful!

#11

Hello Daniel!

I have aggregation, mailer, reorder and search in and that’s it.

As I found earlier, it was the dispatcher being my culprit, and
specifically information NOT inside of Radiant (Images/etc.) causing me
serious headaches. As soon as I did this, it scaled back to two
instances typically with about 70-90MB usage with 6% usage with a slow
creep upwards over time but seems to clean itself up without my host
canning it. Still not a 100% fix, but its working now until I can wade
through this more.

I just need to figure out the creep now.
:slight_smile:
Andrew

#12

I’am not working full time with Radiant (yet!), but I’m trying to sell
projects thats have some not included functionality, so I can develop
it, charge it and, of course, exchange with you.

Now I’m part time employed developing in php with Joomla and SugarCRM.
It’s good to work with several projects. You learn what you shouldn’t
do in your projects!

Mergulhão

#13

Well, I got to talking to a Dreamhost rep, saying that my ‘website’ is
leaking memory badly. I found it hard to believe, but with my
site issues
steadily worsening, I checked out ps aux and logged some
rough stats. I
know my host kills when I get to a total of 200MB memory
usage, or hard

Do you have any extensions installed? If you’re using an attachment
extension, Rmagick has historically been something that’s prone
to eating up your memory, but if you’re using Sean’s attachment
extension that shouldn’t be a problem.

I use mongrel myself - each process takes about 70MB of memory, which is
about what you should expect. 200MB of memory wouldn’t be
enough to run 5 FastCGI processes, but it should be in the range of
3-400MB, not 800MB.

800-1000 pageviews a day shouldn’t need 5 dispatchers. I’ve got two
mongrels pumping out anywhere up to 10000 pages a day. At your
traffic level, you should be able to cope easily with just 2
dispatchers.

Dan.

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