Ruby On Rails

May 17, 2011

I just came across an odd situation in Ruby on Rails where I was working on a fairly complicated form where sometimes you displayed and were editing an existing record, but sometimes you were displaying a blank form and creating a new one. This all worked when I originally was just creating a new record each time but when I also allowed for users to update the data using the same form I hit a problem.

Apr 21, 2011

This is mainly just a quick reference for myself because I keep getting this error and have to search the internet for the solution. Basic problem is that on Ubuntu gems that use the nokogiri library for XML parsing require libxml2 which isn’t usually installed. When you try to install certain gems such as nokogiri or mechanize, either through gems directly or through bundler, get a message about missing dependencies – and when you wade a little deeper that libxml2 is missing.

Mar 31, 2011

First of all let me explain that joining a table to itself normally – i.e. using primary and foreign keys, is pretty simple and can be done using the lovely ActiveRecord belongs_to and has_many association. That isn’t what I am talking about here, I am interested in joining to the same table using other fields and conditions. Why would you want to do this? Well in my case it is the first step in shortlisting customers in the database who have potential duplicates.

Dec 9, 2010

The Barras Car Centre website required that they could upload details of new and used cars and display them, as well as provide a feed of the information for other third party sites. It seemed a good candidate for a simple Ruby on Rails website, which was up and running really quickly and to everyone’s satisfaction. Take a look at the screenshots below, or take a look at the Barras Car Centre website.

Aug 27, 2010

Building Martel Maides a new website was a fairly large undertaking and involved a website build, plenty of custom functionality as well as a complex integration project with their existing back-end system. The website look and feel was provided by a third-party designer and my task was to build the entire site from the ground up including some elements of design, but mostly a large amount of HTML and back-end code which in this case was Ruby.

Aug 15, 2010

After having implemented the Cable & Wireless Guernsey telephone directory into the find website it seemed a really good idea to try to make this work for people’s mobile phones. The basic interface allows users to search the directory but also includes buttons to frequently searched items. The results were limited due to the way they are presented to us but I managed to ensure phone numbers were clickable on most phones – and allow immediate dialing of numbers.

Apr 13, 2010

Fairmoves was a website for a startup estate agent in Guernsey, the project gave me the chance to write a Ruby on Rails application and involved a really slick integrated design. The design used a simple informational front page with a scriptaculous slider control that allowed users to select a price range to view on the property listing page. The listing for each property was put together from highly structured database fields that allowed for some slick graphics indicating the number of bedrooms, bathrooms etc.

Feb 11, 2010

For this project we added the Prototype and Scriptaculous javascript libraries to find.gg in order to provide some sliders and AJAX functionality for a loans aggregator for the local Guernsey loans market. The loan providers can all be configured in the sites admin interface and the customer simply selects their loan amount and term and their loan options are presented in a grid with details fo the company and their offer.

Dec 16, 2009

This project was undertaken to add a new dimension to searching for and finding property in Guernsey. Sellers or estate agents are now able to position a marker on a google map to indicate the location of the property and buyers are able to see this location on a map when viewing the property details. This involved plenty of javascript integration between the find.gg website, it’s Ruby on Rails backend and the google maps API.

Nov 29, 2009

Find was a joint venture between myself and two collegues that intends to satisfy a niche in the Guernsey market. Many websites exist throughout the UK that offer used cars, estate agents and property etc. but with Guernsey having difficult import/export issues as well as being isoldated from the point of view of commuting – a customer from Guernsey has very little use of UK wide searches. I was responsilbe for the core design of the site functionality as well as all of the development and some design.