Hi Guys,
Some of you may remember that a few months ago I sent a shameless
self-promotion email around this list about my site (built in Rails --
obviously - and don't worry there will be more on Rails after the
shameless self-promotion - I've marked it out for you) called Where To
Start With <http://wheretostartwith.com/>.
---- Start self-promotion ----
The elevator pitch for it goes a little like this:
Where to Start With is designed to help you when you're trying out
new bands and artists by providing community-powered recommendations
written by die hard fans.
If that new band you want to try has 10 CD's out, then Where to
Start With will give you... well, where to start with them!
It was built from a genuine need that me and a friend found ourselves
having (I don't know if it's down to the fact we are getting older) as
we were no longer discovering new music in the ways we used to. We just
didn't seem to be exposed to new music all the time like we were in the
past. Between us we made a pact to find two new bands a month for us to
recommend to each other.
Someone recommended Porcupine Tree... their back catalogue is, well,
diverse. This website would have been a godsend and nothing like it was
available so we decided to develop it.
As I say, the initial beta was sent out a while ago, I'd only spent 2
weeks of evenings and weekends building the site and we had gone for the
'good enough' approach of just getting the basic features down and
getting it in front of people for some feedback and see if the idea had
legs.
Well the feedback came in pretty quickly, and yes people seemed to like
the idea (I got some especially good feedback from some NWRUG members)
but they also felt that in it's very basic form it was missing quite a
lot of key features (all of which were on our to-do list already).
So we took a step back and updated the site and we're now ready to
re-invite people to take a look at Where to Start With
<http://wheretostartwith.com/>, here's a short list of the things we
changed:
* You can now add your own opinion on an artists discography -
rather than simply agree/disagree with the original author of an
article, the recommendations on the article are then updated to
reflect all opinions.
* You can add a personal comment on each release in the discography.
* All content is now wiki-style, anyone with an account can edit it.
* Added a better way to keep up with what's new etc.
* We've allowed non-OpenID login, most people outside the tech field
don't know about it/get it.
More details on the beta can be found on our blog
<http://blog.wheretostartwith.com/>.
/If you didn't sign up for the beta last time round and wish to this
time then please mention the NWRUG in your beta registration and I'll
make sure you guys get put at the top of the list for activating./
---- End self-promotion ----
*So why did it take me so long to re-work the site? And more importantly
how did Ruby & Rails come to my rescue?*
Well firstly the end of last year and the beginning of this was very
busy for me after being made redundant and having to find new work I
then had a busy time settling and then there was all that Christmas
stuff. But the second big point was I had no idea where to start (oh how
ironic) with adding the new features, it really was an almost entire
re-write of the code-base as so much needed changing.
I had of course been using RSpec and had probably about a 60-75% code
coverage, but I still just didn't know where to start, even picking out
a single feature to do didn't help as my changes broke the Specs in many
wonderful ways. This really did hold me in an almost writers-block kind
of way, for a couple of weeks I got very little done and just got
frustrated with the failing tests shouting at me every time I tried to
do something. So I reverted everything and started looking at Cucumber.
I'd never done integration tests or used RSpecs story runner and I can
tell you that creating those first few scenarios of how the new features
would work and old features needed to work really, really helped me see
the wood for the trees. Since then (about 4 or 5 weeks ago) it's all
being plain sailing.
So if you ever need to do a massive rework of a project and you've not
looked into Cucumber yet I really would recommend it.
This is also the reason I wasn't able to make it to Thursdays meeting...
the next time I will definitely come.
I hope some of you are interested in the site, and thank you for reading
this rather long mostly off-topic post if you got this far.
-D
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