Christmas Break(down)

So, this Christmas was an interesting one, to say the least. I wasn't able to purchase anyone a gift this year, due to tight funds, nor was I able to visit a few folks who I was looking forward to seeing again.

That being said, all in all, it turned out quite well. My gifts included a swank bike from my father along with a nice gift card to Kohls. My mother purchased a nice Sony Cybershot ( A DSC-W80 for you technical fanatics.) In addition my step-grandmother made me an afgan, which has come in handy during this cold weather.

Outside of that, I've been very personally productive in getting most, if not all, of the things I wanted to do this Christmas, done.

I've finally organized all of my music and my ebook collection (Whew! What a task) The music was greatly helped by a program called picard, which uses the musicbrainz database for all of the tagging information.

After that, I returned to Statesboro and began to finish cleaning my room, and I established a filing system for bank statements, loan payments, etc.

I've done some further work on the Reflector website, noteably making the listing function (Something that is done often) all operate out of one file, so I'm even closer to the "Ruby way".
I've come quite far in the styles for the admin layout, and in the process I've learned quite a bit about the way CSS really works, when it comes to rendering pages.

Here's the current (best) looking reflector main-site page:



Here's the current (best) looking reflector admin-site page:

Back on track and chugging along

So, I've managed to (downgrade) to a different version of rails for the moment, from 2.0.1 to 1.2.6 and this has allowed me to continue progress. I should be able to update once again soon, but for the moment I will wait.

(In addition, forgive the pun)

I went ahead and signed up for basecamp, which is sort of a project management site. They have extended settings designed so that you can host multiple projects, files etc, but I only really need one. For free I can't beat it to be honest.

This weekend has proved to be very fulfilling as far as development on the Reflector site goes. I've managed to rewrite the internal code and improve some of what I had before. In addition, I've learned a ton about some of the Rails methods and how they work for the most part. Especially the find() method.

In the previous version of the site, you would go to a URL such as mysite.com/podcasts and you'd see all of the podcasts.  If you wished to comment, you'd be directed towards mysite.com/podcasts/display_podcasts/(id).

Honestly this was ugly and a waste of code, so I've changed a few things about the structure.

First when the site goes live, it will be a sub domain for its "parent" site gadaily.com. So right off the bat, our URL will be gadaily.com/reflector. I've updated the code to reflect this and so now when you browse to the "Podcasts" section, you'll see the URL as being gadaily.com/reflector/podcast.  In addition, if you look to see comments, the URL is now gadaily.com/reflector/podcast/(id).

Works quite well all in all. In addition I am still really impressed with how rails handles the tiny bit of code I have to achieve all of this.

Ruby on Rails, CSS, and Javascript

It's got a long way to go, but here's the current build on the website that I'm creating for my school's magazine.  (They're picking these colors -- I'm gonna see about getting a designer to look into making them not so ugly)

(Click for full size)

Growing Pains

It can be troublesome to give something such as this a title. When I sit down and really think about it, I never really know what I'm going to post when I do write in a journal entry. I have some general ideas of the topics I want to cover, but never the complete thought of what will form this entry in particular.

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Once a week student media at Georgia Southern puts out a weekly magazine called "The Southern Reflector." It's headed by Robert Greene and it's purpose is to basically deliver feature centric material for the students on Georgia Southern's campus. I'm working hand and hand with him on this publication till he can get his feet on the ground. The staff of the George-Anne also helps out with layout and whatever else is needed.


Things were crazy last night at the paper. We didn't have all of the content in and some of the people who we needed to talk with about their sections weren't available. It happens, but when I'm working at the office at 2 am, it doesn't do much for my patience, outside of make me a bitter old man at the age of 21.

We finished it though and it should be available on the website pretty soon. We need to develop a better system however for getting that information to the web sooner, rather than the later that's the current cliche right now. Despite the moan and groan, there was a lot done right this edition. It seemed like each story was at least edited for content twice and we even had some discussion about the relevance of one of the stories. While not everyone may have agreed with the call, it's good to know that people are looking out for things such as that.

All in all, things are looking better, we still have a lot of room to grow out and expand our ability to cover student life. We're experiencing the pains of a virtually whole new staff, but we'll pull through.