A Small Rails Site and Why You Should Build One

12 Mar 2008

The other day I was showing Rails off to a friend of mine who wanted to know what all the fuss was about and I realized a shocking thing: I was horrible at starting a Rails site. Why? Because for the last year or so I’ve been working on large, established Rails codebases. Which is kinda cool as it shows how far Rails has come, but it sucks because one of the very cool things about Rails is how much you can do in a short amount of time.
which has an admin section so he can upload pics and get them resized and thumbnailed with 10% of the effort.
but I was impressed how much better it’s gotten in the last year. You can now use ImageScience or MiniMagick as the back end image processor and you can save files to Amazon’s S3. And, maybe it’s just me, but it seems like it’s easier to use than ever. Restful_authentication was also impressive in its gains. I’ve had mixed results with Rails plugins for authentication in the past, but everything went very smoothly. One of the things I really liked was the ability to omit the action mailer part of the plugin. Sometimes you just don’t need to be able to email lost username/passwords and it’s nice to be able to leave that code out. Another nice surprise was after upgrading to the latest IntelliJ I found that creating a project with RSpec was an option. Worked well, too.
Rails website as you’ll have fun and learn a bunch of things your day job won’t teach you. Especially about deployment – but that’s another post.