Welcome to another edition of me talking about some website that's been kicking my butt for months on end. If you remember back in this blog, I was beginning to build a revamped version of my family's restaurant website. From what I can gather, and my timestamps seem to be telling the truth on this one, I broke ground on the new site approximately January 29, 2008. Had anyone been around me at the time, I'm sure they would have swiftly commented under their breath "Well, so much for his weekends for the next year". Luckily for me, that wasn't the case this time.

Until this week, I hadn't experimented much with the Google Maps API. Sure I was a heavy user of the web interface and the map integration built into the iPhone, but didn't tinker with the nitty gritty details yet. I decided that since I'm working on an updated version of the website for my parent's restaurant I may as well try something new. With much of the site well underway, one of the missing sections was the contact page. My thinking was that I could create your run of the mill contact page and then for people that aren't familiar with the area, well, let them enter their address and allow Google Maps to do the rest. Easier said than done as usual.

There are a few sections on the site that utilize what I might call a date picker. For instance, on the webcam page, you can select the date you would like to view and then click submit. Magically the images appear for the date you requested. Also, the music section allows you to view playlists for each day back since the creation of the site. Up until now, these were implemented through three separate drop down menus (month, day, year). Despite it being functional, there had to be a way to make it a little more user friendly.

I'm always looking for ways to make improvements to the site. Sometimes the ideas come from my friends, once in a while from users who submit ideas through the feedback form, and other times I'm a victim of my own inspiration. Regardless of where the ideas come from, I sometimes have a hard time keeping my hands of the keyboard even when I should be packing for vacation. Just before the Mayweather fight about a week ago and only a few hours away from my departure to Florida, I decided to add a little more functionality to the search form on the music section.

One of the limitations of the standard search is that when you search for some term, you are returned all results for each album individually. So searching for "oakenfold" would return dozens of results, even though the results only stem from maybe 10 albums. I wanted to make it possible so that you could search and just be returned the albums relevant to the search. Thus, I started writing code.

Since RoR makes it easy to add AJAX functionality, I used the observe_form method combined with the find_by_contents method provided by the acts_as_ferret plugin. With about 20 lines of code and some modifications to my CSS , searching through music is a whole lot easier. To try it out for yourself, just head on over to to the music section and type in a search term. Rather than pressing enter, just watch as the results magically appear before your eyes.

Four score, and one decade ago I began my quest to develop the next iteration of this website. As many of you know, it's been in development for quite a while. In fact, last year around this time I was just venturing into the development of the blog section of which this fine mangling of words was crafted. It's been quite a journey, but I think it's about ready for initial release. Yes, release! I mean I will be placing this site on 'www' instead of 'ruby'. Consider it my present to all of you who have patiently been awaiting (or persistently asking about) the expected release date for the site. Although there is nothing definite at this point, it is certainly looking promising.

With all other sections of the site supporting pretty URLs, I thought it was only fair to take all those dirty URLs in the music section and giving them a bath for lack of better words. Tidying these up was no easy task. It was actually somewhat more difficult than I first would have expected. As it turns out, it was a blessing in disguise since at the time I was coding up the music section, my RoR kung fu was not even up to Mr. Miyagi's standards. Thus, it took some serious re-factoring to get things functional again.

Better Santa Claus water the tree than on my house o' servers if you ask me. With Christmas quickly approaching and recognizing that the site has now been in development well over a year, I figured I would give everyone a status update. Obviously, I fail to keep the main site updated with news, so I'll use this blog as my outlet. Guess what, the site is still in development, but there is hope.

The challenge now a days isn't so much about the production code, it's more about getting the test code written so I can ensure that one small change to an itsy bitsy hunk of ruby doesn't turn into mass failure in other parts of the site. So let's get down to business here, what's up with the site, right?

My back hurts, sleep has been out of the picture, and I've already begun to wear the paint off of the keys on my new MacBook Pro. For what? Umm, duh...the grand 'beta' release of the Story section of the site. I've been hard at work, about 20 hours of it to be specific, trying to fiddle the right bits of code together to produce the 3rd of 4 sections of the website. I began this fine creation by porting the same code I used for the Blog section. While that worked to get things started, after reviewing my code for that section, there was some serious re-factoring that needed to be done for both sections. A few hundred lines of code later, not to mention a number of words that would make a priest cry grimace, it's up and running.

For the past year or so I've been deluged with questions from friends and co-workers asking me when that darn website of mine will be done. It's done when it's done, alright! Designing a website is one thing, developing one in a new language is another challenge, and being pleased with the overall project itself, well, I'm a stickler detail, so every little thing gets under my skin. I won't even go into my normal speech about making it compatible with Internet Explorer, you may remember that from a previous blog.

Well, this weekend consists of one and only one thing...work!!! I have a dozen or so performance reviews to go over for members of my team, each of which takes about an hour or so to do a good job on. Needless to say, I couldn't spend my entire weekend just focusing on my job-related activities. Therefore I decided to implement a minor improvement to the functionality of the site, at least the blog section for now. What you ask? Friendly URLs of course.

For quite some time, I've been using the following dirty URL syntax for viewing blogs:

http://ruby.epartment54.com/blog/view/57

I know, not very friendly and worse than that, it's hard to tell what the heck the blog is actually about. Key in the theme music for 'friendly URLs'.

Although there wasn't much programming involved. I needed to re-factor some of the code in the blog controller, modify one model, modify the routes.rb, and update several views for the blog. Now, instead of the dirty URL mentioned above, the URL for this blog looks like this...

http://ruby.epartment54.com/blog/view/2006/10/7/friendly-urls-on-a-saturday

I'll be writing test code to ensure that this functionality acts the way I want it to as well as doesn't break anything else, but for now, back to going over performance reviews.