At work we just went live with a project for Earth Hour, which began it’s life in Sydney as a 1 hour event where everyone turns their lights off – including big business. Well, this year, it’s going global. Spread the word!
For those interested in the technology, we used RoR and Radiant.
Posted in Postacrds
Over at my work blog, we have just uploaded a post about how we created a Flash Text Cloud for one of our recent clients.
Bottom line, if you are in need of a faux tag cloud made in Flash, there is both a download and example for you to enjoy. And if you’re interested in tossing up how to go about creating your own tag (or text) cloud, we’ve also outlined the reasons we used Flash and not CSS.
Posted in Development, Interaction
Just a short note (while I give my brain a break from the AS3 learning), to mention that the Redant site (where I work) has been updated.
For those interested, we moved to Radiant, a neat Ruby CMS. It was a relatively painless process – although Ben and Toby may have more of an opinion on that one. But I think the site looks gret now, and hopefully we’ll be able to live with it for while.
Posted in Design
So you like coding in Ruby, but want to optimise your production speed? Rails and Vim. OJ, this one’s for you.
Posted in Development
We are in the process of experimenting with Radiant CMS at work, and while looking at the sites that have been built with it, I stumbled across an excellent (and aparently well loved) Ruby site called Try Ruby (in your browser).
I’m sure im the last person in the world to have visited this site – but in case im not, go check it out. For beginner ROR’s like myself, it offers a really nice inline tutorial interface, and for advanced ROR’s… well im sure you know what you can do better than me!!
Posted in Development
A few links you might find relevant while absorbing the Ruby machine. You could get these from Google – or if you’ve stumbled here, from me instead!
There are more, but I havent read them yet, so don’t know if they are any good. Happy coding…
Posted in Development
So, I had my first day hand-in-hand with Instant Rails today. Following the tutorial I managed to get all the way with only a few minor hickups (read: leaving for a few hours, coming back and starting from further down the page and missing a few important lines), which I think is pretty good.
Sure, its not rocket science when you are following on with the tutorial, but it’s a pleasant feeling when the ideas begin to stick. Anyway, here’s what I know, -which is nothing new to
others doing the tutorial:
1. The model
I guess you could call it a data binding. Its a file that connects a table from the project database, to a controller.
2. The view
This is where the HTML markup gets stored. It *does* have some Ruby logic in there, but only for display purposes.
3. The controller
I guess this is like the brains of the operation. It’s the logic.
Tie them all together and you have something like : Bob goes to www.site.com/products. Ruby goes and looks for a controller called “products_controller”, which has in it an “index” definition. This definition attempts to retrieve data via the model “products” and then Bob sees the results of the query because of the template called “index”. A little confusing at first, but then I got the hang of it. And then I realised i’d seen something like this before…
I realised that I’d used a very similar concept to MVC when designing and implementing utsdesign. I had decided then to separate all the logic into one set of includes, templates into another, and then control how dynamic data gets fiddled with in one central location. The first big difference to that approach and Ruby is that in Ruby you don’t really have “pages” like index.php. Instead you have those def calls in the controller. Which is a much neater way of doing things.
Anyway, that’s day one of my learning. A good start.
Posted in Development