It’s been a really productive/frustrating couple of weeks!

I completed the Ruby on Rails projects in the Web Development 101 section of the Odin Project- it was actually a lot like the assignment in my previous post, and if you read that one, you’ll recall that it wasn’t required that we make the app, just read along with the tutorial as it went through it.

The Ruby on Rails project had us follow Jumpstart Lab’s Blogger Tutorial and go through I0 to I4. We were asked to set up a repo on Github and at the end to deploy the app to heroku. [We could go beyond to I5 and I6, but there were warnings about errors in I5, and I was having enough trouble as it was, so stopped after I4.] You can have a nosey at my files on Github here.

Having just made a similar app, I thought this one would probably go into a lot more detail… It didn’t, really. The app looks a lot different from the previous one, but this is thanks to a downloaded CSS stylesheet. [For the sake of the project, I didn’t want to muddle around too much with re-writing the CSS] Two elements which were new in this project included adding the ability to tag articles, making it easier for readers to find articles covering certain topics, and we also added the ability to include images in posts.

I found this to be a lot easier than the previous assignment, just because I was getting more used to Ruby on Rails- I found I could resolve errors faster… to a point! I struggle to admit this, but I found this tutorial more satisfying than the previous, just due to the fact it looked a bit less ‘world wide web circa 1995’… [I know, I know, looks aren’t everything!]

The main problem I ran into was when it came to deloying to heroku. It’s the Odin Project which tells you to deploy to heroku, and I really wished that they’d made it clear on the main page that heroku and SQLite3 do not play well together, and that you would need to make some changes. As it stands, my app is not hosted on heroku [so you can’t play around with it- sorry!] because there seems to be a conflict between my current version of Ruby, and my current version of PostgreSQL [I was nearly pulling my hair out over this, but it seems like that’s the only explanation that I could find…] I know that I’m going to be going back and fixing that later, but as it stands it looks like I’ll be getting a new laptop in the next few months, so I’ll worry about more on that [not sure if I’ll be making any more rails apps til then, so I think I can get away with what I’ve got!]

With Ruby on Rails behind me for a little bit, I’m now doing a bit of reading on Backbone.js and Git, which I’m really looking forward to understanding better, and being able to use it more effectively.

I’m also taking a very short [six weeks!] evening class in web design. So far it’s been pretty basic, but I’m looking forward to diving deeper into it and hopefully sharpening up my CSS skills!

With the promise of a new laptop on the horizon, I’ve decided that I could use my current one to try out a new operating system. I’ve heard good things about Linux Mint, so I’m leaning towards that. I’m currently running [but not loving!] Windows 8, which takes up roughly half of my hard drive… Any other suggestions welcome!