Rudi on Rails - Home

A little catching up

2007-09-05T17:51:00Z

It has been a while since my last post. I did not really get the chance to put all the things up that I intended to, yet. Mainly, this is due to work keeping me really busy these days. Also, there has been some development that will make a significant change to my life over the next few months…

So what happened then?

Well, I deployed my very first commercial Rails application to the public. It is actually the second Rails application I work on for my company, but it was finished earlier. So, there’s a point to argue about ;-) I will make a separate post about it as soon as I get some more time.

Other than this I visited London… twice: The first time in July to see Michael and Emily and again in August to see Steffi, Marko, Christian and Jens from back home in Germany. Both times I went to see friends and to have some quality time with them. As we had good fun and great weather, I really enjoyed both visits and it was a welcome distraction from the every day life. Christian had his camera with him, so he made some nice shot of us and the city. I think it’s best if you see for yourself…

From day two onwards we actually started to do some walking around the city. We went to see the buildings in Bank, relaxed a little in Hyde Park to enjoy the sun some more, and we ended up in Camden Town, of course.

Yes we had a good time. It was great to see my friends after I haven’t for quite a long while. Last time we met was around Easter – and then just for the weekend. Catching up altogether was long overdue. So we met, we laughed and we promised to repeat it again some time :-)

Location, location, location

Now you might ask yourself, or maybe not, why I appear so fancy in some of the early pictures. That was because I decided to try my luck in London after my first visit in July. So, as the second visit in August came closer and closer I sent out my references and, lo and behold, I got myself a new job! I was lucky to get the interview arranged for the same time I was in London anyway so it would kind of save me to go down there again (three hours of train and accommodation nightmare in the middle of the summer season). While my mates were sipping pints I was having the job interview.

I am really exited about this at the moment as this will make a big change to my life for the next few month. It is kind of starting fresh again – meeting exiting people and building new friendships. I look very much forward to this challenge – from a professional point of view also. The company is exactly doing what I was looking for (best prerequisites to start if you ask me). So, I am currently looking for a place to stay which is not easy considering the very competitive market in London. My teutonic heart tells me to get everything sorted well in advance, but down there it’ll be fine to sort out something just a couple of days before I actually move in somewhere. Well, looks like I still have some weeks left before I start in October ;-)

Wish me luck!

Shirt Designer

2007-07-27T08:48:00Z

Look what I found: my bachelor’s final project. This was the second Flash application I ever made, created in 2004/early 2005. At that time I was just starting with Flash MX and my skills were on a rather basic level. My personal goal was to get familiar with the whole software package, learning the Flash way as well as using ActionScript with the timeline.

The title was “Plottmarie” or rather dull: Practical use of the Drawing API in Flash MX 2004. Plottmarie was a real existing firm in Berlin that, unfortunately, does not exist anymore. Their main business was designing logos and layouts of every kind, advertising print, foil plot and textile print. The initial objective was to develop a t-shirt designer application for the web where customers can create their own designs to submit it to the company. They would, then, print it onto the shirt and send it out to the clients.

Getting Started

I must confess that I was initially struggling wrapping my head around the whole Flash thing. Mastering ActionScript was the least problem, but dealing with the problem of running code depending on where you are on the timeline, shesh! Especially running movies embedded into others and executing commands within those to change the parents’ state… you get the point.

Anyway, once I got the grasp of it the development was proceeding surprisingly quickly. The drawing API was used almost entirely throughout the program and to generate the interface. It covers all the basic painting functionalities, although the graphic design could have used some more love. Have fun designing your own shirts:

Where Can I Order Now?

You might ask yourself now: where is the save button and how can I order my shirt? Well, unfortunately I did not get this far. Towards the submission date of this project I simply ran out of time to make it as fancy as I wanted it to be. Nonetheless, I accomplished what I initially anticipated to learn: getting into the stuff that has always astonished and that makes those web sites move.

If you like this little shirt designer, I’d be happy to receive your designs! Make a screenshot and send it to shirts[at]rudionrails[dot]com. I will put the image onto the site if you are a skilled designer ;-)

RS Industrial Services

2007-07-23T10:27:00Z

RS Industrial Services is an independant supplier of industrial equipment based in Billingham. They are a North East Business Award winner in the services category (May 2007). As part of their transition in growing the company, they also needed a new web presence that showcases the range of products and services as well as an online shop, which will be integrated at a later stage.

The approach was fairly open towards the design. The only requirement was to incorporate the existing logo. Therefore, I have designed two main drafts for their new web site. Both come in variations.

A First Approach

With the first design I intended to express the massiveness of a crane, hence the black and yellow stripes left and right. The overall layout remains fairly straight forward with 4 main content rows: logo & contact details, main & sub navigation, banner & links to main categories, page content. The logo of the company was clearly designed for print, which made it a little difficult to frame it into a suitable colour scheme for the web. That is why the red and blue within the contents was altered slightly to a lighter tone. The version without the black and yellow stripes takes off a lot of the weight. Also, to keep the contents clear and light, colours have been used for fonts only (to the most part), as using background colours would have made the layout rather cumbersome. Here are the images for the first design approach:

Second Round

The second design draft was intended to be much clearer regarding the order of contents. Main difference is the change of the navigation part integrated into the banner, as well as the introduction of a third main colour into the design. Also, there is much more use of white space. The drafts merely vary in content placements within the banner element of the page. Here are the images for the second design draft.

The Knock-Out

Altough we have been quite happy with the designs in the office, our client did not appreciate the effort. Apparently I missed to hit the taste within their company, which was a little disappointing, but then again no problem at all. This meant: back to the drawing board. As I was pondering about how to provide a suitable design for the site, their in-house designer knocked up a draft which was received with much liking at RSIS. Very well then, the client is always right!

I had to tweak it a little to make it suitable for the web, as it was designed as brochure. The menu is a hover CSS navigation now, to the give the company the most freedom in extending their range of products and services. You can visit the RSIS web site here. Enjoy the images for the final draft provided by RSIS themselves:

Although the web site looks alright now, I must confess that I am a little offended by the skills of their designer. If I would have known in advance, I could have saved a lot of time on making the previous layouts. Especially the fact that it takes me quite a while to come up with web site designs, as I am not a trained designer. Very well then, I guess someone else might get those designs then ;-)

Railsapp on your main domain?

2007-06-19T21:35:00Z

The common way to deploy a Rails application is to create a subdomain and point it to the folder where your application lies. This works well for those subdomains as well as addon-domains, but what about your main domain? If you are someone like me who bought the hosting solution together with the domain, then you might wonder how you get your Rails app accessed under this domain.

This site is hosted on Bluehost and there is no facility to point the domain to a specific folder via a control panel. Therefore, there general sequence is as the following:

Create your Rails structure with rails myrailsapp
Create a new subdomain myrailsapp in your control panel
Go to public_html and delete the myrailsapp folder
Make a symbolic link to the folder of the rails app with ln -s ~/path/to/myrailsapp/public myrailsapp
Change your .htaccess in the public folder to get the redirect to the symbolic link

On the verge of getting this web site running I noticed, that all the links are still redirected to http://domain.com/myrailsapp/ instead of remaining at http://domain.com/. All would work, but that’s not what I wanted.

Therefore, I reached for a rather drastic approach: link the public_html/ directly to the myrailsapp/public/ folder:

Create your Rails structure with rails myrailsapp
Rename your current public_html folder with mv public_html public_html-backup
Make a symbolic link to the folder of the rails app with ln -s ~/path/to/myrailsapp/public public_html

This all works pretty well for me. The only thing to mind is copying the subdomains/folders/files that are now in the old public_html-backup over to the new one. Since the new public_html is only a symbolic link to the rails app, it was actually copied into myrailsapp/public/. However, everything works as before.

Now, if you smite your forehead and say: “there’s a much better way”, then please let me know!

Welcome to my website!

2007-06-15T13:13:00Z

Lo and behold everyone! I finally made it. Having that domain name for about a year already, I never got around to finish the web site I originally started – until now! In short: It’s a celebration, bitches!

Triple W

Who am I? Hi, my name is Rudi. I work as web developer and general dogsbody in a nice little web design company in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom. Originally coming all the way from Germany I don’t really remember how I ended up here – perhaps I will when writing the about section. That is where you will find much more information about me, what I am currently involved with, and projects I have done in the past. As this site is still fresh and clean (that’s the part where you have to lean back, take a deep breath, and get that new smell), I did not want to overload it with all that stuff, yet. All the empty space will certainly be filled soon.

What’s all this about? This web site is going to be used as general base for everything that I think is worth sharing with the world. You may like it, or you may not – in either case I’d like to hear your thoughts. Mainly though, I plan on using this site to display and extend my portfolio. I have fair bit of online work under my belt already since I started as professional in October 2006, and a couple of really cool applications coming up that are mainly developed with Ruby on Rails. So… stay tuned for more!

Why Rudionrails? For a little longer than a year now, I am using Ruby on Rails – a framework to develop database-driven web applications (Yea thats right: this is the geek part! You normal people out there may skip this paragraph and continue reading further down). All started off when working on my Master’s in 2006. I knew about it before already, but never had an in-depth look at it. I sometimes want to smack myself for not using it before, because it has made me a better developer in many ways. Still, it is not the right post to let my thoughts wander about Rails, I do that enough already at work (wink to my colleagues). So why Rudionrails? Well, Ruby on Rails – Rudi on Rails… get it? And seriously… why not?!

First deed of the day

Actually, I just wanted to share the designs I have made before starting with that site. There were a couple of different layouts and colour schemes, but only two made it to the final run. Kudos to Adobe’s Kuler and the people publishing all those awesome colour schemes there. For design imbeciles like me thats the last resort! The one I am using at the moment is based on the pretty high rated Granny Smith Apple colour set made by Donald Agarrat. Go check it out… you can spend hours browsing through their database. The second finalist is based on an old design I made or this site almost a year ago already. The page layout was very different though. I incorporated it into the layout for this site.

Enough about that! Here they are:

I hope you like them. I actually asked a couple of people before I decided which to use. They all favoured the green one, me included. And, ohh yea, I use mephisto to power my blog. In my opinion, thats an awesome and very scalable CMS for blogging – of course developed in Ruby on Rails.

So, what now? Well, that is pretty much it for today, but I’d love to hear what you think about my site. Happy posting!