I’m on chapter 8 of The Ruby on Rails Tutorial now. Here’s the app so far, hosted with Heroku:
https://arcane-shelf-9437.herokuapp.com/
Fairly boring looking, but soon I’ll be done with the tutorial, at which point I’ll start building my own app, which will be much more exciting.
So while I’m working through The Rails Tutorial I’ll be creating their demo project, but I’ll also be working on my first rails app, which is going to be a writing prompt generator. The interface will be fairly simple, it’ll probably look something like this quick PHP app I wrote for fun (screenshot below).
But the prompt generator will be pulling words from The Princeton Lexical Database to generate random phrases. Upon generation, a timed text input field will pop up. The user will be able to write in the text input field, and the contents will be saved to their user profile, along with the prompt phrase used. There’ll be an option for skipping to a new prompt, or flagging prompts they want to reference again.
One of the most interesting parts of the project will be figuring out an algorithm that will generate some sort of phrase for people to work with. I’ll be posting progress periodically here.
I finally have a desk (read: two adjustable shelves which I sawed down to the optimal height and a 2’x4′ piece of plywood laid across them), and I’m ready to get back to learning Ruby on Rails. I’m working my way through railstutorial.org and it feels great to be back at it after the move. I’ll be posting links to the project, which’ll be hosted on Github. It’s a pretty comprehensive tutorial, breaking off into tangential tutorials for supplementary subjects like git, Sublime Text 2 (the best free text editor I’ve come across), test driven development with RSpec, and more.
More on this to come.
