Updates on Travellerbook.com

I cracked open the code for travellerbook.com this summer, while I wasn't in school, and found out home much work there is to do there. It's pretty daunting, since above and beyond the technology upgrades I'd like to make, there's the issue of updating the look so it doesn't look like it's a 5 year old website.

Since I'm back in school and will likely be traveling during the winter break, I don't expect to be able to work on anything until next summer, and by then I'll probably have plenty of projects to work on that may have a higher priority than an old website that I'm pretty sure no one uses. I have some ideas to change that, but decisions on how far to take that will only be made when I'm not in school or in crunch time at work.

Thinking about version 3

I've been thinking recently about dusting off the TravellerBook.com code and updating it to the modern era. I haven't looked at either the code or the actual site in a while, but oh man, it's in need of some love. There are broken images everywhere, and let's face it, the site is ugly. It's in need of a new color scheme, and a new layout.

I switched my old subversion repositories over to git last night, and took a quick look at my TravellerBook.com history. The initial import was way back in 2006, and it's currently still running rails 2.2.2. It's definitely showing its age, and I've been thinking of using it as a practice app for upgrading to rails 3, since a lot of apps at work may need the treatment soon. It's also a good place to finally start using some the BDD tools and techniques I've been reading about, namely cucumber and RSpec.

The real reason I'd like to update though is because it's embarrassing to look at. I've used this site as a learning project all along, and I was clearly still learning the nuances of CSS and javascript. I've since learned CSS3, jQuery, and a number of other tools and frameworks. The original layout was inspired by friendster, and was started before I really learned how to design more usable websites. I'm still learning that part, but there's not better time than now to update the site and make it more functional. Adding in a BSS test suite will also help me sleep better knowing I'm not breaking everything all over the place as I do it. Well, that's the idea anyway.

Anyway, this being a busy time with work and school going at the same time, I don't expect to see much progress here, but I think this might be a good summer project (along with catching up on reading that I haven't had time to do with school and taking a vacation!)

A Brief Update

It's been a very busy couple of weeks, so I haven't been updating this blog as often as I'd like. I've been working on a few things since the last post. I've started the large task of transcribing my journal, starting at the beginning, which was written at the end of 2000. I've written names of people who were part of my life then, and I can't remember who they are at all now. It's interesting reading my own journal 8 years later. It's like I'm reading someone else's journal. The person who wrote those words no longer exists as he did when he wrote them, and I can see how much I had to learn about life back then. A lot has happened in the intervening 8 years. I wrote about the dread I felt about the incoming Bush presidency, and how I felt a shadow over my new year's eve celebrations just preceding his inauguration. I guess I was right, in a way, to dread the incoming administration, but I couldn't have known at the time how bad it would be. I wrote a lot about my daily activities, who I was with, and what was going through my head. I never realized how moody I was back then. I was pretty good about writing daily or almost daily, and the moods I write about swing wildly from day to day. Mostly, though, I feel like I'm reading a novel, and I'm just starting out. Since I can obviously identify with the main character, I am really interested in what happens day to day, and it's a real page turner. I'll be writing more about my journal once I've done a bit more work on it and find some good work to share. I've only gone through the first week or so of entries. This is going to be a big project. 

I've just about completed the upgrade of www.travellerbook.com to YUI CSS. I'm still using Prototype for Javascript, but the YUI Grids CSS cleans things up very nicely, and makes for bigger pages and as a result, larger maps on the page. Those changes will probably be rolled out this weekend. Some of the changes I've made make logging take an extra click though, so I want to roll out login cookies soon too, so I have to decide if I want to roll that out at the same time as the CSS changes. I've added a few Webkit specific CSS effects, which means the page will look best in Safari, Webkit, and Chrome (and any other Webkit based browser) so most people won't see the fanciest changes I've made. 

I've been doing a lot of rails programming this week (and last) at work. I've rolled out an entirely new web app in just two weeks, which will probably soon have thousands of (potential) users. I definitely feel like I've reached a level in my rails programming ability that I can roll out new web applications quickly without much effort. The hardest part for me now is the web design, which I'm getting much better at, and now having done some work with the YUI Grids layouts, I think that won't be so much of an impediment for me. Hopefully Alexandria Society (or whatever it ends up being called) will be much easier to set up with these frameworks. 

Work Surfing

Work seems to come in waves. I've had relatively little time to work on any of the to do list items listed in the last post. The nice thing about my work projects is that often the things I need to learn to do will be useful for the personal projects as well. 

So far the only thing I've been doing regularly is putting in a little bit of time each day to do some workouts on the Wii Fit. The strength workouts are actually pretty good (the squats left my legs sore all day on Monday, although today it wasn't so bad.) I'm only finding about 15 minutes of free time in the morning to do a workout, which is better than nothing, but it would be nice to have about twice as much time. That would of course eat into my sleep time though, which I don't like to give up.

I've been working on two large Ruby on Rails projects at work - one is a new project I'm starting up this week, and one is an older project that has been around for a long time and I'm adding features to it. The main problem I've had with the latter is trying to send out images embedded in emails. There's a nice gem called InlineAttachment that takes any "image_tag" tags in an email template and encodes the image inline with a content identifier, and replaces the URL given to the image tag with the content identifier. In a regular email, the image_tag would link to a web page that hosts the image, and an attachment would have to be downloaded to be viewed. With inline attachments, your mail reader treats the attachment content id as the URL, so you can refer to the image in HTML via the content id. Normally, linking to an image isn't a big deal, but if your email recipient loses internet connectivity or the image is located on a private server behind a firewall (as is the case in my Rails project,) then having the image inline allows the email to be read with images any time. I was wrestling today with getting email encoding correct, but I've as yet been unable to successfully render an image inline. I'm running out of ideas, but the next step is to change my PNG images to JPEG. After that, I'm not sure why the image wouldn't display properly.