###Live site at http://kaylaamorrison.com
##About I built this Ruby on Rails app from scratch. I did all front-end design and code by hand (no Bootstrap or Zurb) because I wanted to improve my CSS skills. It actually took me about twice as long to style everything as it did to code the back end. I learned a lot about CSS, particularly layouts, and am much more comfortable with the front end of web development now.
On the back end I used PostgreSQL for both development and production for the first time and found that I liked it better than SQLite because it made deploying to Heroku a lot smoother. I integrated the RailsAdmin gem because I wanted to learn how to make an interface that a non-technical user could operate. I liked the look and ease of use of RailsAdmin a lot better than other choices like Active Admin. Figuring out how to integrate a blog posed a particularly frustrating challenge. I ended up going with using Redcarpet to parse markdown that I enter into the new blog form through RailsAdmin, although I would have liked to integrate a Jekyll blog. I wrote an entire post about this topic here.
In the process of making this app Rails 4.1 was released and I decided to upgrade from 4.0 because I originally thought it would be handy to use the new Action Pack Variants feature. I eventually realized that I didn't want to have to edit 3 different files every time I made a change and it's a lot easier to just design one page responsively. This obviously wan't a huge upgrade, but it was nice to learn a little bit about the process and where things can get messed up
##Technologies Used
- PostgreSQL (development and production)
- Deployed on Heroku with Route 53 for DNS routing
- Rails 4.1
- RailsAdmin for management interface
- Paperclip and AWS S3 for uploading/serving project screenshots
- Redcarpet and Coderay for markdown processing and syntax highlighting
- Cancancan for authorization
- Postmark for contact form emails
##TODOs
- Add tests. I was a bad developer and didn't do TDD because I wanted to get this out as fast as possible, it's a small app, and I'm the only one that will ever be in the code base. I learned my lesson though because having to hand test everything to make sure it was working took 10x longer.
- Refactor. There is definitely some logic in my controllers that could be moved to models and there are several very un-DRY bits, like the menu bar and some of the front-page HTML.
- Make it all responsive. Some parts are kind of responsive based on my cobbled-together understanding of how to do responsive design, but I'd really like to get more comfortable doing it.
- Go back and clean up all CSS. I know that any front-end developer would be horrified, but it was a learning process.
- Convert all CSS to SASS - I wanted to make sure I had a very solid grasp on CSS before throwing SASS on top of it.
- Set up the blog section as a Jekyll blog. There is a blog post about this on the live site here. To summarize: there is no immediately obvious easy way to put a Jekyll blog into a Rails app. I would prefer the workflow of using Jekyll to my current workflow of writing posts and then copy/pasting them into the new blog form on the live site. I'd also like to have them backed up on Github.