Same error for me, too. Not at all surprising that a first time Rails app wouldn't be able to handle the craziness that is showing up on the hacker news front page.
My sympathies to the author. This stuff is hard. Don't get dispirited by it.
I'm going to guess that your Google API parser is being rate limited thanks to the traffic volume you're seeing. Try adding some logging to that piece.
Also, you are running an outdated version of Rails that needs a security patch.
Great look for a first Rails project though, keep plugging away! Remember that most people aren't lucky enough to have popularity break their app ;)
Edit for code sample:
Rails.logger.info " * Hitting Google now: #{your_google_parser.response.inspect}"
Redeploy, then:
heroku logs -tail
Second edit for Google API advice:
From what I remember the GDATA APIs have not-entirely-documented rate limits. One naive solution I wrote in the past merely waited one second between sequential requests. This will obviously impact your app's responsiveness, so you'll want to figure out another strategy once you get it back up. Also, once you implement your rate limiting you still might have to wait ten minutes or so before Google lets you back in.
Try faking the Google piece for now (maybe only on every other request?) to get the app up and running again. You can legitimately fix it after the traffic dies down.
Edit: You got muted down to the 4th page, at #130 something down from the top 30. Probably the victim of some flagging or a moderator. Sorry.
The Domain domainmongrel.com is valued at: $0.01
You should give yourself more credit! I'm guessing you pull whois data, PageRank, Compete, MozRank, and Alexa data, and use that to score the domain?
I "valued" two of my domains one that has a lot of visitis and one that does not, the one that does not seemed to get higher valued because it was a .com address.
Looking forward to see the code on github, thanks for sharing.
dead here. This might be of particular interest to a hacker though:
_csrf_token: "nVpKIc5NEHWvddNf5r3Hrzo/4KsB2+1BAVlOk3IY1Mw="
session_id: "e771d56b3c20aff090dc76b3e994fc5e"
NoMethodError in SearchController#search
undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass
http://www.domainmongrel.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&domai...