Over the weekend I was working with a friend over at Panera Bread and during the time she showed me a website called Intellisult which is one of the more hilarious sites I’ve seen lately, going right up there in my book with automeme.

After managing to stumble back over to heroku’s website while browsing HN and posting intellisult lines to another friends Facebook page, I started showing it around IRC causing me to want to make a script to call on it from irssi.

DOWNSIDE: Intellisult uses JavaScript to generate the insults, no API, and scraping the js for the insults sounded stupid. Only real option was to take the insults out of the js and make a script for my client.

So, that’s pretty much what I did. Only, since I had heroku open, I decided I’d check out what all the buzz was for it by creating an application on there to serve the insults in plain text when called from domain.tld/some_name.

In the end I ended up making a small Sinatra application that serves an insult when you call to http://insults.herokuapp.com/some_name. It was quick and easy - took only about 5 minutes.

Now to get to the point of this post.

I find heroku serious BOSS because of how it works. You go to their website and start the account creation process by simply registering with your email address. After getting the confirm you follow and set your password, done.

From there, you gem install heroku and then the magic happens.

Right from your command line you can deploy your application. I followed the tutorial they have here.

Honestly, while it shouldn’t be surprising, it just blows my mind how easy they’ve made it for you to take your application and launch it on their services with little to no hassle.

Create the application on their server? heroku create, then add the git repo.

Put the files on the server? git push heroku master. A few commands later: done.

Even cooler that it supports (currently) Java, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Scala, and Node.js applications.

All this, and so much more. It’s just really cool, even inspiring.