It's Official, I <3 RoR (& Merry Christmas, too!)

Jewls — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 17:15:19 -0500

Sigh. Wow. I’ve just successfully created a Ruby on Rails forum for the site that you’ve all been eagerly awaiting (don’t worry, it’ll be public soon – just a few more weeks!). It’s pretty simple thus far. I spent the last two days just working on basic functionality. Nothing fancy…yet. ;)

This forum is the first major RoR feature that I’ve done almost entirely on my own. It’s my baby. And, I can’t believe it only took me two days – yeah Rails!

Having no programming experience behind me, learning Ruby on Rails started out as quite the challenge. However, this experience has definitely turned me into a lover of the language. I often have trouble stopping myself from working into the night.

So thanks to Adam for inspiring me to give Rails a try! :)

Oh yeah, one last thing… Happy Holidays!

Jewls

"It's Official, I <3 RoR (& Merry Christmas, too!)" by Ethan

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 18:38:20 -0500

WTF is an IDM? It’s an “Inspiration Design Model” and I get to critique five of them over the next 13 weeks for my Interactive Media I class. The professor assigns a website for us to look at and analyze, we each comment with a blog post and reply to at least one of our peers’.

This week’s IDM is smallTransport

...

Well, I’m kind of unsure about this one. I’ve been looking at it for the last week and a half, and I suppose I can conclude that it’s alright. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either. I’ve got a few problems with it…

The layout is too w i d e . Not everyone browsing the net has a 20â€³ monitor. Iâ€™ve got a 12â€³ PowerBook with a browsing screen no bigger than 800Ã—600. In fact, I only have 1074Ã—768 resolution – I couldnâ€™t squeeze the the whole page on here if I wanted to. Ok, rant ended. All Iâ€™m saying is I donâ€™t like to have to scroll horizontally. Itâ€™s just not fluid with the rest of the web – sites scroll down, not right.

Now that weâ€™ve established that the page is just too darn wide, letâ€™s look at why. The answer: the â€˜Daily Bitsâ€™/’Commentsâ€™ content areas. Who puts their comment section next to the article?? After reading the article you donâ€™t want to have to scroll all the way back to the top (to read the comments) just to continue scrolling DOWN! If itâ€™s not the easiest, itâ€™s not the best. So hereâ€™s the plan:

Move the comments beneath the article, k?
Turn the ‘Daily Bits’ into a nifty rotating Javascript feature.
Move the flicker and Rock & Roll column left, beneath the ‘Daily Bits.’
Lower the ‘Input and pause’ search box above the ‘Daily Bits.’
Slide smallTransport logo left, above everything else.
And cut 300 pixels off the right side.

All problems solved. Here is what I liked:

Input and pause – Nice one. The lazy typists dream – you donâ€™t even need to hit Enter to get what you want!! With the pretty little drop-drown box for results, itâ€™s a pretty rad design. However, the â€œuse arrow keys & enterâ€ instructions didnâ€™t work for me, I could mouse over them though.

The rotating image – This confused me at first. I came back to the site and saw a new image at the top of the page and was under the impression that a new article had been posted. I quickly discovered your trick, though. Itâ€™s cool and all, but maybe it shouldnâ€™t be right up there top-and-center.

So, you can see my likes and dislikes kind of weigh-in even. I guess the ultimate question is: Will I ever return to smallTransit after writing this? No, probably not. I wasnâ€™t too interested in the content (some visuals would have helped). He seems like a cool guy, though. Way to go, dude.

JewloftheLotus.com: It's Official, I <3 RoR (& Merry Christmas, too!)

It's Official, I <3 RoR (& Merry Christmas, too!)

"It's Official, I <3 RoR (& Merry Christmas, too!)" by Ethan