My 1st RoR website... Your thoughts please

nikimere

Hey,

This is the 1st site i've built from start to finish using ruby on rails.
I used to work with PHP but i'm now converted! Well at least for the bigger projects i am anyway.
I'd like to hear your thoughts please

http://www.motorsport.ie

Ph3n0m

I am more interested in hearing how you found RoR compared to PHP as from a coding point of view that actually doesnt relate to the site.

Design wise tis nice enough

although in IE 6, your homepage is messed up - the middle column, is shifted underneath the first one

nikimere

Ph3n0m wrote:

I am more interested in hearing how you found RoR compared to PHP as from a coding point of view that actually doesnt relate to the site.

Design wise tis nice enough

although in IE 6, your homepage is messed up - the middle column, is shifted underneath the first one

I really like RoR. I never used a MVC architecture before with PHP mind you.
The one thing i found very nice was the minimal code used to interact with the database. It really helped on this site as there is a fair bit of DB interaction.

It took me a while to get me head around Ruby but once i did (with help from a book called "Agile Web Development with Rails") it was easy very fast to develop with.

The only real problem i had with it was documentation and examples. With PHP there was an example for nearly anything you could want to do online. Unfortunately RoR doesn't have this very useful luxury. www.gotapi.com did help a lot though.

The IE6 thing is a new bug (should have check it before going live!) was working fine on Friday. Will fix that now. Thanks for spotting it

Nice site. By the way MVC frameworks in PHP do work but they have to implement things in slightly awkward ways because Ruby has loads of weird shortcuts for doing things.
On your pages the url is something like: .../list?category=example
With routes you can make the url prettier... not very important but nice nonetheless.
In your config/routes.rb file you can add for example:

map.news 'news/:category', :controller => 'news', :action => 'list'

And then you generate the url not with the url helper but with:

news_url(:category => 'example')

Then anyone can go to: http://motorsport.ie/news/circuit
and it will show the same page as http://motorsport.ie/news/list?category=circuit!
Again... not necessary but pretty cool!

And I agree. The documentation is severely lacking and there are so many ways of doing things... often the little documentation that there is can show you bad practices.
Have fun with ROR!!

Ph3n0m

and that is also damn good for SEO

forbairt

Personally ... I think one of the major reasons people love Ruby On Rails is they never bothered with any of the PHP frameworks ... but yes I'll agree there are other reasons

I've played with RoR and was quite impressed .. I did however find I had loads of trouble with the various module versions and changes that keep on occuring ... I'll assume its stabilized slightly as I've not been following it recently ?

forbairt

forbairt wrote:

Personally ... I think one of the major reasons people love Ruby On Rails is they never bothered with any of the PHP frameworks ... but yes I'll agree there are other reasons

I've played with RoR and was quite impressed .. I did however find I had loads of trouble with the various module versions and changes that keep on occuring ... I'll assume its stabilized slightly as I've not been following it recently ?

Yes. It has. It's pretty much stuck at rails 1.2.whatever now for a few months. rails 2.0 is next, not counting any actual bug fixes.

And what is SEO?

forbairt

SEO ... is what is known as Search Engine Optimization ...

And its how you get your page to the number one position for certain terms ...

google and other search engines like nice urls and tend to not like ?event=45

/event/my_first_ruby_app_gone_online ... is a lot nicer

Ziycon

Nice man, loving the site!;)

zAbbo

forbairt wrote:

SEO ... is what is known as Search Engine Optimization ...

And its how you get your page to the number one position for certain terms ...

google and other search engines like nice urls and tend to not like ?event=45

/event/my_first_ruby_app_gone_online ... is a lot nicer

/event/my-first-ruby-app-gone-online ... is even nicer

Some mod_rewrite would fix it

nikimere

Deleted User wrote:

On your pages the url is something like: .../list?category=example

Yes i do plan on some stage in fixing this so that it shows the title instead of the id number.

I fixed that IE6 bug. Thanks for the comments.

For those of you who have worked with RoR before do you find it slow under load? I've heard that if your site is getting a lot of hits and is quite busy that RoR finds it hard to cope. Personally i've never found this, but the site isn't that busy right now.

KJF

Looks great. My own site is done in Rails too. I never learned php, dived straight into rails and I can safely say I don't think I will ever need to.

Can I ask who your hosting is with?

nikimere

KJF wrote:

Can I ask who your hosting is with?

The only rails hosting i could find that would let me use SVN www.lucidity.ie

KJF

nikimere wrote:

The only rails hosting i could find that would let me use SVN www.lucidity.ie

Thanks.

I ended up going with hostingrails.com which have a fantastic setup and really great support. Only downside is the fact that they are US based.

steve-hosting36

We'll be offering a ROR platform in the next little while...

nikimere

nikimere wrote:

For those of you who have worked with RoR before do you find it slow under load? I've heard that if your site is getting a lot of hits and is quite busy that RoR finds it hard to cope. Personally i've never found this, but the site isn't that busy right now.

Ruby on rails does have a scalability problem. I like rails but I'll admit that much. On the other hand, there are many ways to optimise your rails site with caching, mongrel_cluster, using apache, lighttpd or nginx to serve static content, and just intelligent coding. It's difficult because everything is done differently to php but if you do a few searches you should find plenty of great tips that can really improve performance. And future rails releases should focus on addressing these concerns also.

KJF

Deleted User wrote:

Ruby on rails does have a scalability problem. I like rails but I'll admit that much. On the other hand, there are many ways to optimise your rails site with caching, mongrel_cluster, using apache, lighttpd or nginx to serve static content, and just intelligent coding. It's difficult because everything is done differently to php but if you do a few searches you should find plenty of great tips that can really improve performance. And future rails releases should focus on addressing these concerns also.

Yeah, I've read about this too and I think a lot of people are blowing this out of proportion. The first site to really highlight this was Twitter which to be fair has 11,000 pageviews per second. Most people won't have to worry about that kind of traffic.

Yeah I think you're probably right. A lot of PHP enthusiasts claim that sites lik google and yahoo have no scalability problems with php and twitter (around 700 alexa ranking) does but I mean, come on. Think of how many top-class servers google and yahoo have!

nikimere

Deleted User wrote:

On your pages the url is something like: .../list?category=example
With routes you can make the url prettier... not very important but nice nonetheless.

I fixed that and made my URLs "prettier"! thanks for the tips.
I also made the story ID's more SEO friendly