Judith's language learning blog

After spending several hours trying to get this nifty plugin to run and scouring the internet for solutions, I’ve decided to publish what I found, even if it doesn’t fit with the general theme of this blog.

First off, let me state that Paperclip, contrary to expectations, only needs ImageMagick, not RMagick, though you’re better off installing ImageMagick from the RMagick installer for Windows so that you don’t have version conflicts later if you need RMagick for something else. Furthermore, ImageMagick does NOT need to be referenced in your Gemfile, or required in application.rb .

You DO however need to refer to the ImageMagick directory in order to get Paperclip to run. This is done by putting
Paperclip.options[:command_path] = 'E:/Ruby192/ImageMagick' (or similar) into your development.rb, otherwise you will get the usual “is not recognized by the ‘identify’ command” error. It appears to be vital that the path to ImageMagick does NOT contain spaces.

Obviously this is going to be annoying if you’re part of a team of developers using different operating systems. I saw one post advocating the use of
if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin/
in order to be able to specify a different path for Windows users, but this does not work for me.

Let me introduce myself here in this first post.

My name is Judith Meyer, I’m a 25-year-old German girl living in Berlin with my American boyfriend, Chuck Smith. I originally come from Kamp-Lintfort, a small town near Düsseldorf, but I’ve been living in Berlin since March 2008 and I absolutely love this city!

I have a huge interest in languages, programming, politics, history, philosophy and methods of learning and teaching. My university major is French studies, with minors in computational linguistics (wish I could take that as a major!) and management. I just need to write my thesis to complete my degree, but it’s taking longer than expected because I work so much on the side. I tutor people in German, Latin and Esperanto over the internet, occasionally also French or English, and I work as the project manager of GermanPod101.com, also writing and recording most lessons. When I need a mental challenge, I like to program in Ruby on Rails or play the ancient Asian game of Go.

Read more about my starting point in each of the categories!