EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I don’t know why, but I can’t stop listening to Saves the Day lately. Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post.

I don’t think it has one, to be honest with you. Just wanted to drop a line and say hello. Give you all an update on my Rails progress. And other fun tidbits, I guess.

Rails is going surprisingly well. It’s a great framework and Ruby is a great language. I had problems learning even a little bit of Python, but Ruby has been a snap so far. Probably because it’s so spoken and only has two types of arrays (Python has at least 3). Not to mention the useful help you (usually) get from the IRC channel.

My first big project has actually been going well. I’ve locked down the alpha version and I’ve started really digging into to the beta. It’s a gaming database that’ll eventually support game blogging and commenting. It’ll also generate custom reports that can be saved out to PDF. Yeah, I know, sounds adventurous and over-the-top. It is. But you always do a cannonball to get over the shock of cold water.

So what does it do right now? Well, you can add games and consoles of course. Users have to log in to do anything that modifies the database. In the beta version, users can modify their profile to list their email address and a short bio of them. I’m thinking of adding a file upload so you can post a picture, but I haven’t decided yet. I’m leaning towards yes, though, since that’d make an easy addition to the blog side of it.

All in all this has taken me about 4 or 5 days of really working on it (not just poking at Rails). I’ve had a few people beta testing it, and I’d post the link here, but my host just took down Ruby support last night until some issues get sorted out (server kept crashing).

I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for Rails, too, it seems. I’ve posted about it several times on here and I’ve gotten Ray, Manny, and Pete all interested in it. I think Ray’s the only one who’s actually stuck a foot into it, though. It’d be really handy to have a Rails expert on my AIM list, though. Maybe I’ll have to try and fill that role for the others.

So, enough about Rails and programming. Elaine and John and I went to their mother’s house over the weekend. We ended up watching Howl’s Moving Castle ’cause we all love Miyazaki’s movies. It was typical Studio Ghibli goodness. I recommend it to anyone who likes animation, be it Japanese or not.

Well, I guess that’s about it for now. I’ve been working on a simple Rails app (damnit, there I go again) to use as a tutorial for any who are interested. Leave me a comment and if there’s some responce, I’ll finish it and post how to do it. It’s a shopping list. I’ll try to add in some nifty AJAX or something to make it more worthwhile.

By the way:

Which Family Guy character are you?