Rails 3 Success and Never giving up

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi All,

It's been a little more than 2 years since I first started working with Ruby on Rails. At that time, I was out of work and looking to get involved with development rather than infrastructure. Lo and behold, the Ruby language and the Rails framework was something that held a lot of interest to me. Being out of work at the time, I read several books over a weeks time and started my first reborn project that culminated from years of working with statistics for college football in a PHP driven site. In 2 to 3 months, I had my first rails 2.x production site going and it was a solid success.

Today I look back at what I accomplished and what I have built today and would like to showcase both production sites that I now work solely on. I am the sole developer, creator, administrator, and owner of these sites and they were built with Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.10.

http://nflstatpages.com http://ncaastatpages.com (this was my first rails production site)

Both sites use html5, no flash, jquery, jquery mobile, and some custom components I built on my own. They are also fully integrated with oauth and have applications built in facebook, twitter, and I'm now working on a google plus variant. In addition, I built a zong api framework to handle mobile phone payments and was pleasantly surprised when paypal ended up purchasing them.

I didn't want to promote my sites (even though football season is right around the corner), but I wanted to show others that if you have an idea, maintain drive, put effort into everything you do each day, you can become successful. I now work as an infrastructure and systems administrator for a high profile company on my normal time, and continue to build my stats sites on my spare time. The sites I've built are valued right now at about a quarter of a million dollars and continue to grow. The total operating expenses are less than $5k per year for both combined.

It doesn't take much to work on a successful project so long as you have a tangible idea that is worth investing in. I'm hoping that in 3 to 5 years I'll be able to fully leave my job and work 100% on my sites, competing with Accuscore who I've successfully beaten in straight predictions going on 2 years now.

Take care and happy coding. I believe in ideas and success. I hope you do too.

2

Nice.

I don't know if you care, but the 'Login' and 'Register' links are not positioned correctly in Safari 5.05. They are stacked on top of each other like this:

Log In | Register

which makes the Register link spill out below the black tab. The links are positioned properly in Firefox 3.5.7

3

Nice.

I don't know if you care, but the 'Login' and 'Register' links are not positioned correctly in Safari 5.05. They are stacked on top of each other like this:

Log In | Register

Possibly related

and

Colin

4

bundle exec rake db:migrate:down VERSION=<long number here>

5

+1

6

Thanks guys. :slight_smile:

The iframe validation errors are actually facebook's issues, unfortunately. I may build a custom block just to fix those validation errors down the road.

I'll look into the 5.0.5 Safari quirks. I've tested in IE, Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari 5.0.5. I don't have the issues you are showing in my safari 5.0.5. Are you running yours from a MAC? I'm running safari from PC with no issues.

Strange.

7

Congrats! An uplifting tale.

-R

8

Hi All,

It's been a little more than 2 years since I first started working with Ruby on Rails. At that time, I was out of work and looking to get involved with development rather than infrastructure. Lo and behold, the Ruby language and the Rails framework was something that held a lot of interest to me. Being out of work at the time, I read several books over a weeks time and started my first reborn project that culminated from years of working with statistics for college football in a PHP driven site. In 2 to 3 months, I had my first rails 2.x production site going and it was a solid success.

9

Alpha Blue wrote in post #1018004:

Thanks guys. :slight_smile:

The iframe validation errors are actually facebook's issues, unfortunately. I may build a custom block just to fix those validation errors down the road.

I'll look into the 5.0.5 Safari quirks. I've tested in IE, Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari 5.0.5. I don't have the issues you are showing in my safari 5.0.5. Are you running yours from a MAC?

Yes. OSX 10.6.7.

10

7stud -- wrote in post #1018118:

Alpha Blue wrote in post #1018004:

Thanks guys. :slight_smile:

The iframe validation errors are actually facebook's issues, unfortunately. I may build a custom block just to fix those validation errors down the road.

I'll look into the 5.0.5 Safari quirks. I've tested in IE, Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari 5.0.5. I don't have the issues you are showing in my safari 5.0.5. Are you running yours from a MAC?

Yes. OSX 10.6.7.

Same issue in Safari 5.1 on OS X 10.7.1 (Lion). This probably has nothing to do with a Safari quirk, but rather a font rending difference between Windows and Mac OS. Spacing is certainly different on the two platforms.

I overrode the stylesheet using Safari 5.1 Web Inspector and changed the font from Andale Mono to Helvetica and the text rendered on a single line. It's likely that font is taking more horizontal space on the Mac than on Windows.

11

Robert Walker wrote in post #1018137:

I overrode the stylesheet using Safari 5.1 Web Inspector and changed the font from Andale Mono to Helvetica and the text rendered on a single line. It's likely that font is taking more horizontal space on the Mac than on Windows.

Wouldn't that be a problem in Firefox as well then? Yet, the positioning is fine when I view the page with Firefox.

12

More info: If I change the text size by zooming in (View>Zoom in), then at some point there is enough room and the links align horizontally on one line.

13

Hmmm....Safari also has something in the View menu that says "Zoom Text only". If I check that (without doing anything else), all the graphics immediately get bigger, including the black tab, and the links align horizontally. Then if I View>Zoom in, only the text gets bigger and at some point the text gets too big for the black tab, and the links are split in half and stack on top of each other.

14

Hi guys - thanks for the troubleshooting help. I found that on windows the view zoom menu has no ill effects when fully zoomed out and fully zommed in. It definitely appears that it's a slightly wider font difference on Mac vs. Windows which is strange to me since it's a very safe web font.

I created a small hack for safari browsers only for the login panel which should fix the mac difference using:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0){   #open { font: normal 10px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif !important; } }

15

Looks good. If I zoom all the way out, so that everything gets really small, on the very last size the links stack on top of each other again. Because I doubt anyone will view your page at that size, it probably isn't worth sweating.