spacing hack

yelyah

solo piano 20101117

I got a real late start on my rumble project last night. And ended up staying up like 4 hours past my usual bedtime, but it was totally worth it.

I actually took my own advice from the last rumble and decided to deploy early, deploy often. So I actually have something to show early on this time:

feedme.heroku.com

Okay, so technically it wasn't actually all that early in the process, but it's way better than the last rumble where I wasn't ready to deploy until like the last 2 hours of the 48 hour window. And did I mention that I had never done a traditional deploy of a Rails app before that? Yeah, not so smart.

the app

So if you visit my food photo page right now, you'll only ever see photos from October 6th, 2007.

I have a lot of behind the scenes work that's going to have to happen for this project, which basically amounts to finding/organizing/uploading 3 years' worth of food photos that are on various hard drives.

So right now the date is hardcoded simply because I don't have anything recent uploaded to flickr. But I plan on resolving that early today.

Hosting with heroku wasn't an option for the official rumble, but now I'm free to host anywhere. I have still yet to decide what will be my primary deploy place, but I chose heroku for now because I figure it would be the quickest way to get my app up and running.

I decided to go with Sinatra this go round. It's probably not a permanent decision for this particular project, but it seemed to be the right choice for now because:

  1. it's had a recent release, which wasn't true at the time I was investigating options for the rumble. I don't want to hitch my wagon to a project that might be stagnating. Plus, at the time I was using ruby 1.9.2 for everything and sinatra was absolutely broken on that version.. now I'm using ruby enterprise edition, rendering it moot, but still.
  2. it seems to be a good choice for rapidly prototyped apps that don't require activerecord. And since flickr is basically the "database" for now.. problem solved.
  3. just to have a sinatra app under my belt because I can't compare it to rails if I haven't actually used it.

It feels good to be stretching my brain in this way again.

And even better to think that I might actually do that "food photo app" that I've been talking about doing... for years. Literally.