Small Business ROR Developer

I was attempting to use a fantastic jquery lightbox image gallery which shows thumbnails of images within the gallery.

However, due to RUBY ON RAILS being almost too perfect, it was not working.

Further digging around on the interwebs revealed that the standard caching of images which appends ‘?32234234’ being a date time stamp, was causing problems with rendering thumbnails.

As I am better at rails than jquery, i included this line of code to fix the problem.

<%= link_to image_tag(person.photos.first.image.url(:tiny)).gsub(/\?\d+$/, ”), person.photos.first.image.url(:medium).gsub(/\?\d+$/, ”), :rel => “personPhoto[#{person.cachedslug}]”, :alt => “#{person.first_name}”, :title=>”Viewing: #{person.first_name}’s Pics” %>

What it does, is removes the question mark and all trailing numbers prior to rendering the contents of the image tag.

Seems a bit cumbersome, but it works … it could use some refactoring, but that comes at a later stage in the project.

I would love to hear your thoughts?

http://papertoleaustralia.com/ approached me with a simple request.

We have had our online store active for over 10 years, and it is in desperate need of a change.

The task seems simple enough… or so I thought.

They are running EziMerchant Professional software and have over 2000 products in their database. There was also a time restriction, as they were due to launch another 200 items over the next 2 weeks from the original request.

In order to come up with a simple solution that would be cost effective, aesthetically pleasing and easy to maintain and expand, I had to dig deeper into the software.

I must admit, the software is fantastic and really easy to use for any shop owner, and has come a long way in the last 10 years.

So I created a new layout mockup in photoshop, keeping in mind how the software renders menus, products images and other tags etc …

Once approved, the new design was implemented within 48 hours (allowing time for checking, re-checking, and of course those nasty ie6 bugs).

Due to the nature of the software, I also provided the wonderful people at paper tole australia a crash course in improving their site for SEO purposes.

A fun challenge, and another happy client.

Cheers,

Matenia

Just finished a new site (well as much as I could do considering the client failed to give me all the relevant content on time)

The content is pretty basic, but I managed to utilise rails to handle alot of the processing.

Public Features

• Browse pages
• submit form for enquiry

Admin Features

• CRUD Pages (with wysiwyg editor)
• CRUD Content Blocks (static content items across the site)
• CRUD Clients & Client Types (categories)
• Manage Admin Users
• CRUD + Clone Newsletters
• Filter Newsletters by Client Types and only send to active clients that fit that specification

I know it seems like it wasn’t much for 2 weeks work but the HABTM between client types and newsletters was driving me nuts for a while but thanks to Ryan Bates (yet again) I managed to get it down pat.

However, I never consider this to be time wasted. Duplication of this project’s logic would only take 2 days from here on (excluding precious front-end design time of course).

The content is not 100% yet, but you can see the site at http://www.totallycovered.net.au/

Keep on rails-ing.

Cheers,
Matenia 

Over the past 10 years of my web design & development ventures, I have used a myriad of resources, applications, hosts etc …

My top development resources include:

• The entire adobe suite - covers every graphical and coding resource needed for successful design
• Text Mate - Easy to read, customisable themes, great command line support, lightweight and just really pretty to work with.
• Cyberduck - Easy FTP and SFTP access - I do love the edit button which loads your default text editor for all html files
• Terminal - When coding with RUBY ON RAILS the terminal is yet to fail me. You just have to know your commands.

A few people have pointed me to a few IDE’s but I have found them cumbersome, and really overloaded with features that you really don’t need most of the time.

Working on a Mac is pure bliss, as interchanging between programs really does not feel as inhibiting as working with a windows machine.

What can you recommend?