Apparently I am a dummy, and this book seems to be what I am looking for. It asnwers a lot of my questions about the hows and the whys, as well the all important wheres in Ruby on Rails. The book is great, written in an older version of RoR, but then again they all are. The differences between the older version the book uses and the current 2.1 version are minimal, thats a HUGE plus in my book. It minimizes the amount of time I spend trying to find the new methods, and keeps everything understandable. I recommend this book a lot if you’re trying to learn RoR.

So the theme is done, mostly, and it will be great when I am ready to implement it. That theme however is not going to be applied to this Wordpress version of the site, it will be used for the RoR version I am beginning work on (again). I have a much better idea of what I need to do, and what I want to do. As with any project I’ll start with the needs, and add in the wants when I am done. I am a firm believer in get the thing working, preferably well, before adding any new functionality. Some may differ on that sort of view, but I find the cause for that is something not based on a product’s, in this case site’s, best interests.

On a sidenote, I am trying to find some freelance sidework. As the bubble of our economy continues to collapse, I think more and more people will be looking for cheaper smaller projects to be completed to save time and cost. I would like to work on my portfolio, or lack of one currently. Please take a look at the resume, linked on my about page, and contact me if there is a fit.

Learning RoR is an interesting thing to do in my opinion. Everyone seems to write about it for one reason or another. There are lots of tutorials, articles, blog posts, conferences, etc… The one thing I keep running into is this. Almost everything I read says, “Do this, then this, then bingo you have a blog!”. That’s all fine and dandy, but I want to know why I did these things, what these things are doing, and what it will do for me. I would rather someone tell me what the relationships are, and what the syntax is. I can fit the rest of the pieces together myself usually. If anyone knows of a site or book that explains what does what in the framework, without the extra 1000+ pages of junk, please let me know.

My major hurdle with RoR is that I find 3 different sites with different guides or posts about what to do to accomplish something. All 3 will do it with a different feature in the framework, and none explain why, or what the difference is. If using scaffold, resource, and model all accomplish the same end result generally, why have 3? There must be a difference, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. API documentation is boring of course, and following in true programmer fashion I read the parts I need. If what I want isn’t readily available, I look for another source.

I am still working on styling, my mind cannot seem to do it’s job and pick something already. Even the colors I am thinking of are in a constant maelstrom of ideas. Maybe I should do them all, and have a lovely pallette switch at the top, but I hate those.

Thats all for now, if anyone actually reads this blog, please feel free to leave a comment, even just a hi to let me know I am not blogging into the abyss.

So this is the story so far. I have tried Goldberg, Mephisto, and made an attempt at Typo ( the blog not Typo3). They all failed for their own reasons. Goldberg was too bloated and all in the end not easy to manipulate. Mephisto was awesome, it’s like Wordpress on Rails. In the end I failed to freeze the Mephisto app, and Rail 2.0 came out. Those two factors plus my shared hosting resulted in, you guess it, broken app. Lastly that brings us to Typo, wonderful Typo. That attempt failed at the start. Typo, I had high hopes for you, after all I am a fan of Rails, but alas, you failed at the most basic task…installation. Typo has almost no documentation, fail. The documentation I can find make no sense, fail. The project itself does not even have a real website, fail.

The lessons learned from these wonderful, packages were,  if you want something done right, do it yourself. That brings us to the current situation. I needed the site usable, and updateable. But I am still playing catchup with Rails 2.0, now 2.1. So as I refresh and relearn, I decided to toss up every bloggers friend, Wordpress. Now I just gotta settle on the theme. Feedback is welcome as always, updates are coming I promise. For real this time ;)