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.

The idea seemed simple, take what used to be a site of average design and functionality and forge it into something more up to par with today's standards. Back when the Cadet Restaurant first gained its presence on the web, its only real purpose was to reserve the domain name and serve as a small christmas present for the family. It was mostly HTML with sprinkles of PHP here and there, nothing extravagant. There were a number of sections left uncompleted for years to come and I'll admit the site became stale rather quickly, although my parents did appreciate the virtual presence they now had.

Fast forward a few years. Myself and web design had our spats, but for the most part we made it through the whole revamp of this site. I gained a greater appreciate of CSS, the wonders of Photoshop, and this framework called Ruby on Rails. Combine that with the fact that I needed some kind of present for my parent's and their restaurant's anniversary and voila, I had myself enough reason to develop a new, and hopefully more respectable, version of the website.

Back when I started this project, I really tried to figure out how I could leverage the site in a way that would benefit the restaurant. After doing some thinking, I settled on some fundamental concepts. First, it's a restaurant, so it has to have a look and feel that screams "mmm...food". Second, the restaurant has long history and serves as a landmark in the community way back to the days when there were car hops. Therefore, I needed to make sure to cover the restaurant's history and make it engaging to those that enjoy reminiscing and telling stories about the good old days. Next, I needed to make sure that people knew how to find the restaurant, especially those that might be in the area passing by.

Last, but not least, I needed to devote some content towards the car cruises that are periodically held at the restaurant. People continue to come from all around to attend the cruises and marvel at the shiny pieces of machinery that show up.

The project took approximately 2 months to complete. As usual, the entire look and feel (i.e., screens) were designed prior to any code being written. This continues to be one of the most effective approaches I've found for my own web development.

At the end of the day, the site consists of 573 lines of code (not including CSS/Javascript/HTML). Surprising, at least to me, was the amount of test code weighing in at 1,723 lines. That's a 1:3 ratio, not too bad if you ask me. Curious about the combination of bit that run the site, well, here's a list.

Hardware and Operating System

• Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy Gibbon)
• Pentium 4 2.0GHz
• 160GB RAID 1
• 1GB Memory

• Apache 2
• Ruby on Rails
• MySQL
• Mongrel

• Capistrano
• Subversion
• Trac (yes, I'm the only bug reporter)

• RedCloth
• RMagick
• rcov

• attachment_fu
• calendar_date_select
• exception_notification
• permalink_fu
• validates_email_format_of (my plugin)

Javascript Frameworks

• Prototype
• JQuery

Development Tools

• Photoshop CS3
• CSSEdit
• Textmate

• Internet Explorer 7.x, 8.x
• Safari 2.x, 3.x
• Firefox 2.x, 3.x
• iPhone Safari 1.x

Finally, at approximately 10:10 PM on Saturday, March 22, 2008, I made the necessary configuration changes to deploy the new website into production.

Not to turn this into a sappy Oscar like speech, but I have to thank a few people. Thanks to all the contributions and support from my girlfriend, family, and friends, I think the final version came out great and I couldn't have done it without you. Thanks for putting up with me for the last two months!