Outside of my day job I have been keeping myself busy lately with our new son Jack and a new development project. I have been keeping late nights with Jack and the glow of the computer monitor coding away at a new community website. I am building a social network website using ruby on rails. I have worked with Ruby on Rails over the past 2 years but nothing has ever made it out of development. This project aspires to be different and make it into production.
The site is to be a community portal for the landowners of Tonka Park Springs where we purchased land last year. The land is just outside Ha Ha Tonka Park off HWY D among the hills and trees south of Camdenton, MO. There are lots of landowners and only one or two houses built at this time. My intent is to build a site that can allow the owners to share the experience of building out their new homes on their 5+ acre lots. It would be very helpful to get to know each other, share recommendations of local builders and contractors and show off the final homes when complete.
To do this I have chosen to use Ruby on Rails as my application framework. The rails community provides a long list of plugins and gems to help get you started in building this type of web application. I want my application to be simple and clean. Some of the other projects out there like lovdbyless and insoshi, which are both well designed and supported social network applications, have so many requirements and dependencies it is hard to get them up and running without detailed knowledge of the application.
The application will be invitation-only once it is up and running for the owners. However, depending on the progress and succes I will consider opening the site to the public or starting a second site that is public and possibly even open sourcing the code.
For now let me share the list of useful gems and plugins I have utilized at this point:
- Clearance – an authentication and registration gem by thoughtbot.
- Paperclip – this is so easy for file uploads.
- will-paginate – it does what it says.
- RedCloth – I am starting with this for the post sanitizing and formatting. We will see.
With this project I am also looking into writing tests more proactively using:
At this point I am in the look and feel stage. I have written much of the actual functionality and now need to make the application look finished and ready for users. I hope to share more progress soon and even a write up on how I used some of these gems in my application.
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