Posts Tagged ‘internet’

Racquetball website

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

A year or so ago I took up racquetball and found I have a natural affinity for it. I have pretty quick reflexes, I don’t mind diving for a ball, I play really intensely, and I’m left-handed.

I joined the racquetball tournament at the local health club, and was appalled that the standings were sent out once a week as an Excel spreadsheet attachment. Since I was just making the leap into internet programming from application programming, I volunteered to write a site for free in Ruby on Rails just for the experience.

It’s turned out great, and each season I’ve been spending a few hours on it to improve a couple of small things. The original code was pretty embarrassing, since I was just blindly trying to find my way. There is still lots of refactoring to do, but, it works, so there’s no hurry.

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Posted in Internet Programming, Rails, Sports | No Comments »

The Contradance website

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

I rewrote the Charlottesville Contradance website a couple of years ago when I was learning .NET. I found that .NET is a good platform in some ways, and a weak platform in others.

What is good is that I was able to easily place widgets on the screen and associate them with data. I created a fairly rich site (for the time!) without learning a thing about JavaScript. It also has “master pages”, so you can create a template for a number of pages without having to repeat the same HTML over and over.

What is bad is pretty much the same thing: I was an applications programmer and I was able to create the site without having to change my paradigm and without having to learn much about HMTL, CSS, or JavaScript. Some of the .NET pages I created tended to be pretty heavy. What is also bad is that the site needs to be hosted by a Windows server, and that limits your choices.

The entire schedule is driven by a set of XML files. My thinking was that I’d like to keep an entire mirror of the site on my computer and just FTP it up. That way, I can’t lose data if the ISP goes under. In retrospect, I think the way to go is to use a database, but have backup procedures in place.

One of these days I’ll rewrite the site in Ruby on Rails.

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Posted in Contradance, Internet Programming, Programming, Rails | 3 Comments »