Reinventing Wheels
It’s been about two weeks since I started writing the ruby on rails app for this blog. I recently took a look at some of the established RoR blogging engines and this feels more like a somewhat circular rock. Even though this app is lacking a lot of the regular features of a blog, I’m extremely happy with how it turned out.
Learning Rails: Namespaced Controllers
A common requirement of a visitor facing web application is that the administration component of the app is behind a login with a different layout, style sheet and feel. Rails 2.0 makes this very simple with namespaced controllers. On a recent project the specs called for the administration to live under an /admin path, simple enough.
Instant Gratification through Unanswered Posts
I’ve been a member of Rails Forum for over a year now, since January 2007 to be exact. In my first year and 3 months I managed to make about 90 posts. Looking back these are mostly “newb” questions and solicitations for getting on the right track. This was when I was casually using rails and getting up to speed.
Paging Dr. Cache
When I launched this blog last week I thought it was slow because of my small (256MB) Slice at Slicehost. Then I read about people optimizing their rails installations, so I optimized and it got a bit faster. But, it was still slow. So I read up on optimizing the speed and memory usage of Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. I made some enhancements and it got a bit better. Problem was, it was still REALLY slow.
The Battle Between the Right Way and The Working Way
I’ve this got awesome full stack framework at my disposal, various books, videos, articles and open source examples, yet rolling my own commenting system was a challenge in and of itself (otsn: is this the same as ‘unto itself’). I thought I had things working for me with my nested routes and simplistic system, however I guess it goes to show you that even the simplest systems can be massively complicated and confusing in the right hands.
Adaptive, Iterative and Agile Development is Fantastic
The ability to work in short bursts of agility leads to amazing results. The ability to quickly adapt to changing needs brings satisfaction. The ability to combine all of these with Ruby on Rails makes for a happy developer. Adaptive, iterative and agile development with ruby on rails is fantastic!
Paperclip and Amazon S3
I recently added the ability to give each one of my posts a photo. It makes the entire site a bit less boring and gives it some human feel. I found the excellent paperclip plugin from the thoughtbot guys. This allowed me to easily attach pictures, have them resized and display them along side my posts. However, I ran into some problems with managing the upload files, no worries, Amazon S3 to the rescue.
Blog Improvements and Updates
Tonight was the night of much needed updates and improvements to this here blog. It’s been a while since I spent a considerable amount of time doing anything major, but I did make some kinda-sorta-major updates, but those were mainly to the back end system. Hope everyone who’s visiting keeps enjoying it!
Who Needs The Show Action Anyway
We all know that Rails has seven standard REST actions, index, show, new, create, edit, update and delete. Usually there are only views associated with four of them, index, show, new and edit with new and edit usually being the same. This all makes perfect sense for the public facing part of the application, but what about the administration portion of your app? Do you really need that show action? Are you going to be displaying the information in the same way as the public facing side of things? I’m starting to think that skipping the show action in the administration portion of the application is not a bad idea.
