d13design.co.uk [ dave waller ]

While getting to grips with Rails I followed a number of tutorials and screencasts, many of which were confusing and ended with me deleting my Rails projects and starting again. What I’m hoping to do with this series of blogs is combine all of the best bits from the tutorials I used to guide you through the process of creating an actual application.

For this guide I’m going to assume that you’ve got Rails set up and I’m going to be using the environment detailed in my earlier post although you can do much of this with just a basic setup.

So, what are we going to create?

The first tutorial I embarked on was creating a simple blog. This consisted of a main homepage listing recent posts as well as pages for managing and creating posts, I later added the facility to comment on posts and started looking at styling, templates and Javascript to lift the application.

What we’re going to create here is an application called “Gabber”–a simple collaborative micro-blog (a bit like Twitter) that allows people to post a short message and allow everyone to add comments. The reason it’s collaborative is because we’re not going to look at authentication so it’ll be an open system.

We were in the garden the other weekend doing a bit of work re-seeding the lawn now all the weeds have died back and Jake started shouting that he’d found some “creepy things”. Not quite sure what he had found, we went to investigate what appeared to be a big mound of soil next to the greenhouse.

As we got closer we noticed it was covered in ants! It appears that one whole half of the nest had slid off revealing the network of tunnels inside.

The ants didn’t look best pleased by this and they were scurrying frantically trying to recover all of the eggs that had rolled out of the main chambers. Just before hosing the whole lot down I managed to grab some quick photos of the ants at work…

I’ve been quite excited by Ruby on Rails for a while now but I’ve never actually had enough time to sit down and figure things out. Well, recently I plucked up the courage and delved in.

There’s tons of tutorials out there helping you get set up and coding with Rails but I found many of the a little hard to follow and, being a designer more than a programmer, I found myself going round in circles with a lot of trial and error. I finally got myself sorted and I thought it might be useful for other people in my boat if I blogged about just what I did.

This post will tell you how I got my Windows based development environment sorted and subsequent blogs will talk you through some of the first little projects I undertook.