Earlier today, Ruby on Rails 1.2 was released. I don't like to wait around so I went ahead and upgraded. Well, let me rewind for a second. I wasn't bold nor brave enough to even consider upgrading the production site with the new release. Rather, I decided to upgrade my development environment to get a taste of the problems I was going to experience. One rake test was enough to conclude that I had a fair amount of work ahead of me.

Whew, it's been a tough week and a half. Earlier in the month I began coding up the section of this website dedicated to music. The functionality itself is something similar to what I've tried to accomplish in the past, however, rather than manually entering music track information, this time it needed to be automatic. Like I mentioned in a previous post, thanks to Brandon Fuller's Now Playing plugin for iTunes on OS X, I can now use iTunes as the agent that makes the POST requests to this web site. The rest is handled by some Ruby on Rails magic.

I've been writing Rails test code for what feels like the last century. Unit tests, functional tests, integration tests...ick! I finally managed to get it up to about 1.3 lines of test code to every line of production code. Now that I've hit that point, I figured a change in coding behavior was necessary.

For quite some time, I've been using my own AppleScript code to do a HTTP POST to a certain web service on my site. Yeah, I guess this worked, but it wasn't quite as slick as I would have liked. There were a few plugins available, but nothing to useful. Now Playing is a useful iTunes plugin written by Brandon Fuller and was previously only available for the Windows platform. It provides a number of features, one of which was what I mentioned above, however, until now, it hasn't been available for OSX.

I've had a crazy couple weeks. Two weeks ago was one of my good friend's bachelor party and last week was my sister's wedding. As I opened awakened my laptop from sleep mode on Saturday morning, I browsed to this site and realized that I had been neglecting development for a few weeks, the primary reason for such neglect was the fact that Rails 1.1.x hasn't hit the stable branch on Gentoo. Oh, but wait, did that really matter?

Well, not really. You see, I do all my web development on my laptop. At the press of a few keystrokes, I can replicate all my laptop code to the production website...oh how I love rsync and Textmate. I also use a hunk a burning software called Locomotive, which kindly bundles all the necessary packages (e.g., Ruby, Rails 1.1.x, RedCloth, etc) necessary for my web development into a single self-contained application.

Whew. Tell you what kiddies, thank frickin' god for the #rubyonrails IRC channel. Rather than spend a lovely Friday evening relaxing and soaking in the wonderful weather that is not Pittsburgh, I decided to make some more progress on this site. Basically I've accomplished a few things tonight.

I went ahead and got the 'Popular Blogs' panel working to your left. Then I moved onto changing the static HTML on the main page where the blog section was to the 'live' content. That's right, the first 'live' content is on the front page. Wudda think of that! Oh yes, and the one feature that was more work than it was worth, the 'Archives'.