Planet Urf

The first pass at the website is almost finished now. As I said I've only put together a static site just now. The dynamic site will come once I finish designing the basic Rails site (which is almost complete now as well).

Rails 2.1 has just been released so I need to download it and make sure that what I've done so far will work on that. I know that the way migrations are handled has changed to include a timestamp. It doesn't affect me as such because I'll be the only person working this project but I might as well go back and recreate the few migrations I've created so far. A little pain now saves a potential headf*ck later!

I had real problems trying to upgrade to a test copy of Ruby 1.9 on the Mac. Because there are issues with running make on readline 5.2 on 10.5, Ruby wouldn't install past the readline. There are fixes such as blogged by The Accidental Technologist and on the Ruby forum by Yudi and Han but I couldn't get either to work. Probably just too noob at OS X! I'll wait until the formal release before I start working with it anyway.

At any rate, Rails 2.0.1 didn't work with Ruby 1.9 and I haven't read through the release notes on 2.1 to see if it does so no big loss.

Well, that's the static HTML written. Now I just have to CSS up the design. We've been looking at modular CSS lately in work, so I've decided to use the same approach here.

Modular CSS is just a fancy way of saying split your CSS up into separate files depending on what you are styling and then join them together in an overall CSS file using XPath imports. There's a good example given on Content With Style so thanks to Mike Stenhouse for that.

As you will see, I'm no great shakes on the web design front. I can get by with CSS and get the coding side of things mostly right but my sense of style and taste leaves a lot to be desired. That being the case, I'm going to go for a fairly simple design.

More later once the design is under way.

I've made a start on the website now (as you can see)! The plan is to design a bunch of static content just now so that I can get the design worked out. I'll then start building the dynamic site in Rails.

I'll post as I go along to get down any issues I run into. This will be the third full site I've built in Rails and I have to say it's a joy compared to JSP or ASP. Even PHP takes a beating due to the ease with which you can test and debug in Rails.

Having said that, I'm feeling the disadvantages a bit more this time round as both Ruby and Rails are both going through a major release. Ruby 1.9 is out (although not fully supported by all gems ... including Rails) and Rails 2.0.1 is now solid (with 2.1 on the horizon I believe). This means that code that worked in my two other sites may not work now and will need to be rewritten. As such I've decided to go back to the manual on this one so that I can track the changes and update my other two sites as well. I'll let you know how I get on in case you're interested!