What I like most about Rails is the database interaction. The steps to setup a database table for content [on my MacBook] are:

1. Generate a model with  Terminal.app (script/generate model content title:string body:text)
2. Migrate the database in Terminal. (rake db:migrate)

Fill the table with some content and then from the controller in your page definition (index, new, edit, show, etc.) you simply write:

@content = Content.find_by_id(params[:id])

That basically tells the controller to use the Content model and then find the record by it’s id (which in most cases is the third part of the url after the .com/, so in content/show/1, 1 is the id). After that in the view it’s just simply a matter of calling <%= @content.fieldname -%> to write the data to the screen. If I had to do this in PHP it would take at least twice as long since I’d have to create a database in phpMyAdmin, then write a connection script, then query the database, and finally return it as an associative array for easy use in the page.

I’m still learning, but just from experience this has been the easiest language to learn thus far. In the last few months I’ve had to learn a bit of C#/ASP.Net for work which completely sucked and was a royal fucking pain to learn. PHP took me a awhile to learn initially too, but then again PHP and Rails I learned/am learning on my own time, and not because I had/have too.

I have to create a mini-admin for uploading new photos and updating theme information, but other than that it’s done. I’m deploying it using SpringLoops. It took over 40 versions and 7 hours to create. I like what I ended up with. So come on feedback, like it, hate it, etc.?

Everything worked great as before, a few bugs popped up because of they way it had to be setup. After fixing those bugs and sending it to the client for approval, I was informed (by the client) that the sliding panes don’t work in Safari 3 for the Mac. I opened the page in Safari and sure enough they didn’t work. After checking that the Javascript file had indeed loaded, I looked on Google just knowing someone had to of experienced this same problem.

I didn’t find anything, which was discouraging at first until I had an idea. I had used code similar to $(’.field’).focus(); with a function to run when you focus on a form field (usually radio buttons). I made a duplicate of my Javascript file and then did a find and replace. Replacing every occurrence of “focus()” with “click()”. Tested the file and sure enough the panes worked in Safari. I’m not sure why “focus()” wasn’t working, focus should be a valid event in every browser. If anyone has information on why “focus()” in jQuery doesn’t work on Safari 3 for the Mac, I’d be interested in hearing it.

Of course they come back and say that it is indeed installed. So I ended up exactly where I was when I started, until I went through my log files and started removing lines from my .htaccess file until the error my logs revealed disappeared. Now, I have no idea how the original .htaccess file works on one sub-domain, but not another. It doesn’t really matter to me either, I’ll just be using the new one from now on.

CodeIgniter .htaccess for DreamHost

Then the opportunity arrised where I could learn the framework. I was working on a larger project and I was sick of having so many pages, plus anyone who looked at the site could figure out it’s PHP. I downloaded CodeIgniter and in about a week I had recreated what had taken me about a month to do in normal PHP. I’ve since been able to make more changes to the original project that I was thrown into. I’m using CodeIgniter on more projects as they come in at work, and on some of my own which will hopefully launch soon.

ElliLab has done an amazing job of creating a framework, and I applaud them for releasing this to the community as open-source.

I am moving all of the worthwhile development/design articles from the old version of the site to this version. It’s a slow process because of the formatting Textpattern uses but I hope to have it done by tomorrow. If an article from the old site is missing, and you would really like to see it here, just leave a comment and reference it’s title, or general subject.

Happy New Year everyone.

It’s essentially Matt’s code with a couple of tweaks. I removed the need for inline styles by using the title attribute on the bar div.

<div class="box">
	<div class="bar" title="70"></div>
</div>

The above example will create a bar that animates from 0% to 70%. It will also display the width of the bar just like Matt’s example does.

You can download all of the source files to create the bars on the example page. I hope someone finds them useful and if you happen to use them, send me a link so I can see them in action.