Running staticmatic preview command results in webrick error

Question

I get the following error with the following staticmatic preview command

staticmatic preview my-app
Site root is: my-app
StaticMatic Preview Server
Ctrl+C to exit
[2010-12-16 11:42:24] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2010-12-16 11:42:24] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10) [i486-linux]
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:63:in `getaddrinfo': getaddrinfo: Name or service not known (SocketError)
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:63:in `create_listeners'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:75:in `listen'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:63:in `initialize'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:24:in `initialize'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.2.1/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:10:in `new'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.2.1/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:10:in `run'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/staticmatic-0.11.1/bin/../lib/staticmatic/server.rb:62:in `start'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/staticmatic-0.11.1/bin/../lib/staticmatic/mixins/server.rb:5:in `preview'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/staticmatic-0.11.1/bin/../lib/staticmatic/base.rb:71:in `send'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/staticmatic-0.11.1/bin/../lib/staticmatic/base.rb:71:in `run'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/staticmatic-0.11.1/bin/staticmatic:16
    from /usr/bin/staticmatic:19:in `load'
    from /usr/bin/staticmatic:19

Answer 1

having rolled my sleeves up and debugged my first ruby app, i find this spurious line:

host = staticmatic.configuration.preview_server_host || ""

not much point in "" as a default, so then it was tracing where to set staticmatic.configuration.preview_server_host

the docs say "You can put a file called configuration.rb in your staticmatic project's basedir/src directory"

but follow this for why that doesnt work and the solution