CasualHardcore

I’ve always been astounded by the pointlessness of Twitter. The real secret of Twitter is that it melds (mashes-up, if you will allow me some Web 2.0 jargon) utter pointlessness and total addiction in equal measure. Thinking about it last week I suddenly realised that what I really needed was a way to update Twitter automatically … and so AutoTwit was born.

I’ve been coming to grips with Ruby on Rails for a while now … my day-job alternates between Java and PHP, so Rails is something that I only get to do in my spare time or on private projects (like Eastern Front).  AutoTwit was the perfect scenario for testing the new release of Rails in the wild.

• Rails is Rapid: the entire project took about 6 hours of continous dev time, not counting stoppages.
• Configuring Rails and Ruby on the MacBook took a little bit of effort. The default install isn’t configured correctly and I had to go back and start again using the Hivelogic tutorial. Straightforward, but diagnosing the problem was the hard part. I am still getting to know my way around OS X.
• There’s a Gem or Plugin for everything - I found a Rails Twitter Plugin which made the job a bit easier. Not that the Twitter API is complex in anyway. I was confounded for some time by various issues on the Mac (see previous step).
• As often seems the case in my work at the moment, the most time consuming part of the process was the interface. Rails handles database and controller logic with aplomb, but navigating JavaScript, CSS and browser compatibilities is a different story. CSS is a time-sink, in particular … I think this is the nature of the beast more than anything else, design requires pushing pixels around till everything is just-so. I must admit I gave up before everything was perfect … there are some minor alignment issues in Safari, for example.
• I love Rails. As I said to a friend who has been brainwashed by my raving about how wonderful Rails is: the only problem with learning Rails is that you’ll hate your day job. Enough said.

Next up is some more work on Eastern Front. And a rather hare-brained vision I am currently pondering …