I know that the Ruby language and associated tools are created for free by enthusiasts, but quite often there are little issues that spoil the experience. Like this one;
I needed to install Rails on Ubuntu 8.04.3. After installing ruby gems 1.3.5 I did this;
The solution is here. You have to edit the /usr/bin/gem file that was just installed.
Now I can work around this kind of thing, but I wonder how many people coming to Rails for the first time are put off and go away with a bad impression. I guess I ought to contribute.
Recently I’ve worked on several community based web sites. Here I’ll discuss the lessons learned and also describe some of the considerations in building one. Its mostly common sense.
By ‘Voluntary Organisations’ I mean groups in the UK who operate on a not for profit basis. Typically they are small bodies with a handful of permanent staff or volunteers and have very specific remits. Their funding comes from charities, local government and often the National Lottery. They don’t have IT departments and may not have any staff who have been involved in making a web site before.
The logos below are links to the sites that I’ve made for this kind of organisation.
The Community Edition of Alfresco has a footer showing their logo, copyright and some scary phrases to encourage you to buy the Enterprise version straight away.
We needed to remove the scary phrases and I quickly found this useful explanation of what to do by Tom McQueeney.
So I checked out the source, edited PageTag.java to alter the footer and compiled it.
Here is a groovy front seat view of a glider launching. I don’t often take a camera up but on this day Rob Taplow did the flying from the seat behind me. All I did on the launch was to press Record. And to find a Rolling Stones song to go with the video.
I had a lot of time to think as I cycled to Scotland. And one of the thoughts was that all of the phone boxes are fading to pink. Nothing stays the same.
The one pictured here was the first example I found on flickr. Its in a village called Holme, Nottinghamshire which was only three miles off my track.
Today I handed over the administration password of Make One Change Today to West Bridgford’s foremost community organiser, Kate Troy (not Kate Tory as I wrongly spelled it earlier).
Here is a screenshot of the new web site that I have built and hosted for Broxtowe Youth Homelessness, a charity that acts to reduce the number of young people leaving home prematurely.
For the Community Accounting web site I used Google Maps to display the locations of seventy organisations around the UK. I provided John, the administrator with a web page so that he could edit the locations by automatically geocoding postcodes. I stored the long/latitude in a MySQL database and generated the necessary javascript from within a Ruby on Rails application. Continue Reading »
I write and host web sites based on databases. To do this I use a mixture of PhP, Java, Ruby, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, Sugar Suite, Drupal, Wordpress, Jahia, ESRI maps and Google Maps. I am a freelancer based in Nottingham, UK.
Please contact me if you need a reasonably priced dynamic web site.
