jimdrewes.com

New jimdrewes.com

Jim Drewes Posted on Mon Mar 27 07:30:28 CST 2006

In case you haven't noticed, jimdrewes.com has changed. I've been learning some Ruby on Rails, which is an agile web development framework built around the Ruby programming language, that also easily enables AJAX features.

For those of you who don't understand a word of that, I re-wrote jimdrewes.com in a language that lets me develop quickly, and offer some cool new features like the on-the-fly commenting.

Post your questions, comments, and bugs to this thread.

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:: Response posted on 2006-03-27 by Jim Drewes

Okay... first, let me list some new features (actually, there aren't many.)

Now you can post comments directly from the front page of jimdrewes.com. Just click on the "Comments" link for any post and a fancy AJAX feature kicks in that slides the comments down, and gives you a box for posting.

I think it properly displays the $ now, so when you post that something costs about $3.50, it should show up.

Actually, thats about it for new features. The code base for jimdrewes.com is less than 1/10th the size of the code base when it was written in PHP. Some numbers:

The original PHP version of jimdrewes.com consisted of approximately 3600 lines of code.
The Ruby on Rails implementation only has 325 lines - and that INCLUDES built-in functional tests and unit tests. If you take out the test code, the number of lines comes down to 221 lines.

Of course, some features have been left out, but certainly not 3400 lines worth. In fact, I'd say that 85% of the functionality has been re-written in rails.

Things removed from jimdrewes.com:
I was in a rush to re-write this in Ruby on Rails, so I didn't re-code a lot of things. For example, you can't click on usernames to get stats about how many posts they've made or what the most recent posts were. Also, file uploading has been disabled, as has user registration. But, most of these features weren't used by us anyway.

Bugs:
Here are some known issues that I'm working out...
1. "Latest Comments" is all messed up. It doesn't show in the proper order, and is adding some to the list that shouldn't be there until you log in.
2. The Hide link when viewing comments doesn't work on all platforms, and the platforms it does work under, it doesn't give you the progress indicator while you are waiting.
3. The "Post Comment" link is altogether broken. All it should do is link to the same page as p-link, but hop you down to the comments box.

Let me know if you find anything else.

:: Response posted on 2006-03-27 by Stu Belden

A few things: The comment box is really small. Most of the textfields/areas are smaller, really. The comments could have a greater width than they do currently, I think.

:: Response posted on 2006-03-27 by Stu Belden

being able to edit posts/comments would also be nice.

:: Response posted on 2006-03-28 by Jim Drewes

You're right. I forgot the comment editing piece. You can edit threads though. Its just not AJAX enabled.

:: Response posted on 2006-03-28 by Stu Belden

you're so web 2.0 jimmy.

:: Response posted on 2006-03-28 by Jim Drewes

Yes. Yes I am.

:: Response posted on 2006-03-30 by Jim Drewes

Here is another bug. If you click the "home" link, and then click the "home" link again when you are already on the home page (to refresh or something) it takes you to jimdrewes.com/app/app which doesn't exist.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-02 by Jim Drewes

Okay. Comment width is fixed. So is the Post Comment link. I already fixed the latest comments stuff too. Also, the home link stuff is fixed.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-02 by Jim Drewes

Well, the show/hide links with progress indicator work great on Firefox on Linux. We'll test it out in FF and IE on a Windows box later. Does it not work for anyone?

I've also finished on-the-fly AJAX comment editing. Sweet.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-04 by John Ebel

Bug: There's not a hot naked chick on the front page of the site. Jimmy, please fix ASAP...

:: Response posted on 2006-04-04 by John Ebel

Lots of times in IE as I move around I see "Error on page" on the bottom left of the browser, but it doesn't seem to really affect functionality.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-05 by Jim Drewes

Like a Javascript error?

:: Response posted on 2006-04-08 by John Ebel

Yup.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-11 by Woody

supersweet

:: Response posted on 2006-04-12 by Stu Belden

Also, you should make jimdrewes.com faster, as it seems to be stuck in molasses atm.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-12 by Jim Drewes

I know. Its the DB. I think because I used Ruby on Rails, and I had to hammer it into an existing schema, it generates a heck of a lot more queries than it used to. I need to figure out how to optimize it.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-14 by Stu Belden

Maybe you should use Oracle. I hear it's fast.

:: Response posted on 2006-04-20 by Jim Drewes

Heh.. very funny.

:: Response posted on 2006-05-19 by John Ebel

I get a very annoying script error every time I hit the main page.

Most IE users won't see this, but I have my settings turned so that "Disable Script Debugging" is unchecked and "Display a notificatin about every script error" is checked, because that's what you do if you're a developer and need to debug things sometimes.

Anywas, it's super-annoying because it pops up _every_ time I hit the page, so just checking comments and everything...Pretty much anytime I do anything it pops up.

I emailed the exact error to you Jimmy...

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