everyday

I am almost finished re-writing this weblog engine in RubyOnRails! And it is way better to boot. So far I have implemented the following:

• user authentication
• access control lists
• tags
• comments
• pretty URLs (sort of)

There has been a good deal of hulabaloo on the web regarding RubyOnRails (RoR). Claims that it makes coding 10 times faster abound, unfortunately I don’t think this is true. Perphaps when I get up to speed with RoR this will be the case, but not so much now. The list of things to do grows shorter, but it still exists:

• archive list
• tag cloud
• gallery

One of the new features that I would like to implement in the next iteration of this weblog is a tag cloud. I think that tag clouds are an interesting way to let people know what is going on and I am definitely interested in the whole “folksonomy” trend. I think that folksonomy could become very important in the not too distant future, especially if some sort of standard is accepted and a couple of the major search engines get involved. I can imagine a world where a site like del.icio.us is a major player in the search wars (that is if it doesn’t get swallowed by Yahoo! or Google).

really need to stop overthinking everything and just RubyOnRails do it’s thing. I have just spent a good amount of time trying to the next iteration of this weblog to display all of the comments for a given post, sounds easy right. Well, despite it actually being easy, I have tried and tried to make it very difficult. I was writing a custom comment finder to make a collection of comments available to the post that was completely unnecesary. All I really needed to do was:

<% for comment in @posts.comments %>
do some stuff here…
<% end %>

So easy, yet I endeavored to make it so hard. I am so used to the programming language and the framework getting in my way that I feel it necessary to try and work around their limitations. RubyOnRails is extremely intuitive, the only problems I have faced have been problems of my own making.

I think I am getting this Ruby on Rails (RoR) thing. So far I have duplicated the basic functioning of this weblog with RoR. I can add entries, edit them and delete them. While the list of things to do is long, it is not daunting. I will say that the one area where RoR is lacking is in online tutorials, how-to articles and just general information. This is probably due to it being so new. It took me forever to figure out authentication (allowing only the appropriate person to create/edit/delete entries), but once I did it made sense. It is amazing how intuitive RoR is. What little I have done so far would have required substantially more coding in ASP.Net, which is what I have used thusfar.

In my never ending quest to confuse the hell out of myself, I began working with Ruby on Rails today. I just ordered a book to help teach myself how to program using the Ruby programming language and the Rails web application framework. If all goes well, I may be switching this weblog over to Ruby on Rails. I had mentioned previously that I was going to switch to the C# programming language, and I did. Unfortunately I was a little let down with the experience of working with Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer 2005. It just didn’t do what I wanted it to. Specifically it still generates tables for almost all of the default server-side controls. This is so last year! I really hope this Ruby on Rails thing works out.