Rubberband Wound

I’ve been working on a site in Rails for the past few weeks for my Dad’s company. It had been going really well, I was playing with some new approaches that I hadn’t tried before, I used RJS for the first time, and I was finally going to move him over to Rails from the old ASP site I’d written 3 years earlier.

I hit a snag when I had to send the contents of a registration email on to him. ActiveMailer would not work, and I had no idea why. I banged away at it for days, getting more frustrated all the time. I copied code from sites I’d in which I’d used ActiveMailer before; I rewrote the thing several times.

Locally, I’d get a message that the email had gone through fine - but no email arrived.

In production, it would just fail. 

The error message I was getting said ‘wrong auth type none’, which didn’t do much to help. I dug around online a bit, and finally realized the problem. My authentication was set to ‘none’! Changing it to ‘plain’ did the trick, and emails were flowing forth from the system.

This had caused me such a headache and so much frustration that I was ready to be done with Rails for a little while to clear my head. But now, seeing the obviousness of my mistake I’m completely reinvigorated and ready to work on even more Rails projects - we’re going to rework TightWad soon, and I’m going to help a friend learn Rails the same way Brian taught me: sitting down for a weekend and making a site for a friend/client.

I’m excited about it all again. Oh, and now that this problem is solved I can finally feel alright reformatting my machine, which  has been unberably slow these days.