automagically.co.uk

I've been playing around with various book related sites, gems, plugins etc. in order to get my next web application up and running.

In order to get some seed data for the website (as a test), I also used Hpricot to scrape some sites, I just wanted to nod towards an amazing tool - although I'm also looking into HTTParty in this space.

The gem I settled on to get deep information on books was the Amazon ECS gem by Pluit Solutions (who are also behind BookJetty).

I'm hoping to get the site up and running in (very limited) beta soon, as I had a few days off from work last week and was able to make huge advances on it.

Please stay tuned...

Taking yesterday's learnings with Ruby and Sinatra, I decided to make my app in less than 24 hours.

Now, the application is a starting point for a large app that I have in mind for authr.co.uk, and it only allows you to search and find articles on Wikipedia (so nothing amazing!)

I'm using Hpricot, the Wikipedia API.and the MediaCloth gem to cobble together something of use to me in a short timeframe.

I'll be improving the application over the next few days hopefully (given time) and adding features along with fixing bugs, but I'm impressed with my ability to stick to a plan (getting the app up) and learning new things fast!

Any feedback, please leave a comment.

Yesterday afternoon, after being sent home from work early, I thought I'd try out Sinatra as a way of learning more Ruby

I've been needing to learn more in-depth Ruby for a while, and looking for an excuse to do so, being bored yesterday was one reason, and Sinatra sounded cool, so I thought I'd give it a go!

It literally is as easy as it says in the docs, and below is all you need for your Hello, World! application:

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'sinatra' 

  get '/' do
    "Hello, World!" 
  end

Off to have more fun, and hoping to launch my first app before the weekend is out!

I recently found Scout on a blog post (somewhere I can't find again to link to!), and thought I'd try it out on my Scottish Football Archive website.

To my surprise, it was easy to install on my shared hosting, easy to setup and great to use.

Monitoring my Rails applications has always been something I am interested in learning more about, and how to use the statistics generated to make my application more efficient, as this is the step which always confuses me - I have a lot of data about performance, requests, timings, but what do I do with them?!?

Scout doesn't help me do this (although it does have pretty graphs!) but it does focus me on learning more about this subject.

I'm currently hosting my apps at Rails Playground for $5 a month, and although this is fantastic in terms of price (and most definitely service!), only a few days on Scout has shown me that my application is suffering due to being on a small hosting package, so it's time for an upgrade...

... without me having to do anything!

Last month, my Scottish Football Archive site dropped out of the top 400,000 in Alexa rankings and I decided to do something about it, so I redesigned the club pages.

After speaking to Dave Moor at Historical Football Kits, I changed the club kit images to be "historical", adding to the "archive" aspect of the site, and in the process I aligned some of the data and added in more links for each club.

I check back on my Alexa ranking and it was almost immediately back into the top 400,000!

Something was obviously up (I'm not that good), and there is an Alexa announcement about their improvements and a TechCrunch post about the overhaul.

There is still much work to be done on the site, and it'd be nice to think that all changes will have such an immediate impact!