My first project for my new job at Bonanzle was to clean up the account registration page. After removing text, a few fields, and reordering the inputs we ended up with the form you see above. I’m really happy with the results as it cuts down on unnecessary verbiage and allows the user to fill in the form and be done with it.

jQuery inline validations plugin: This jQuery plugin was a breeze to use and it even let me easily setup my own validations and error messages using custom regular expressions.

UI Fundamentals for Programmers by Ryan Singer. This presentation was really helpful to me when I started re-developing ChapterBoard last year, moving away from my prototype built with Drupal in favor of the PHP MVC framework KohanaPHP. I highly recommend it to anyone else who is working with an MVC framework. Even if you have a lot of experience with your framework, Ryan’s approach to developing an application UI is very helpful.

The presentation is curtesy of Chicago Ruby and 37 Signals’ Ryan Singer

Setting up Passenger, Ruby 1.9 and MongoDB on ubuntu

I used this to setup a cloud instance for a rails3 application that I just wrote. My first attempt at deploying a rails application and it was made a lot easier because of this. Very straight forward and up to date.

The only part I changed was to use the ubuntu/debian package for MongoDB because they work and it’s a lot faster to install them and get updates (instruction here: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packages)

Thanks!

Learning Ruby on Rails

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with ruby on rails to try and get up to speed. I’m really liking the way applications are laid out and it just feels like a really well thought out framework. At some point down the line I’ll end up rewriting ChapterBoard in Rails 3. Unit testing alone in rails is probably worth the hassle of rewriting all the work I did to launch ChapterBoard on the Kohana PHP framework.