d13design.co.uk [ dave waller ]

Well, the other week I finally succumbed and we all headed into York to look at some puppies Caroline had found on Gumtree. She’d wanted a puppy for a while now and I wasn’t too sure but when she showed me the pictures I was swayed and phoned up to arrange to go and see them.

When we went to check them out they had a total of six puppies with only one of them taken which was quite a surprise as they’d been advertised for a while and they were incredibly cute (and cheap too). The dad is a Cocker Spaniel and the mum is a Parson Terrier so the puppies aren’t going to be too big and they have a really inquisitive and playful temperament. All of the puppies were black with little white bibs and a few had short terrier ears and a few had big, floppy spaniel ears.

I’ve now had my Windows Mobile phone (HTC TyTn on T-Mobile) for just over a year now and I still love it. Getting my emails done on the train in the morning, browsing the web with 3G and WIFI speed and getting in a quick game of solitaire all makes life worthwhile.

I’ve also been playing about for a little while with software to run on it and thought I’d blog about some of the better bits-n-peices I’ve tracked down.

With a long weekend booked off from work we decided to all hop in the car and head up to the Yorkshire coast for the day. We headed out past York (sat in the rush hour traffic for about an hour) and then sped up the A64 towards Scarborough. We split from the main traffic and headed over to Filey–a bit quiter than Scarborough or Bridlington.

We managed to park up right by the beach and headed down for a look around. After a quick tour of the beach we set off for Filey town in search of a cash machine and a bucket-n-spade shop for Jake. On our travels through the town centre we even stumbled on a small Italian deli where we stocked up on fresh Ciabbata and olives for a slightly more sophisticated picnic.

The last few tutorials have got us pretty far with the “Gabber” application–we’ve now got a micro-blog up and running allowing you to create new posts (using Ajax no less!) and view them in reverse order as part of a styled page.

What we’re going to do now is add some extra bits for choosing avatars when posting messages and the ability to comment on posts too.

Remember, you can view the final application at http://gabber.d13design.co.uk/gabber/public/posts.

Now, if you’ve been following this series of blogs so far you’ll have set up a neat little Rails development environment and created your first application–a little micro-blog that lets you add, show, edit and delete short posts. What we’re going to do as part of this blog is add some styling and formatting using layouts, view files and CSS. So, fire up Aptana and we’ll get started.

Remember, you can view the final application at http://gabber.d13design.co.uk/gabber/public/posts.

While getting to grips with Rails I followed a number of tutorials and screencasts, many of which were confusing and ended with me deleting my Rails projects and starting again. What I’m hoping to do with this series of blogs is combine all of the best bits from the tutorials I used to guide you through the process of creating an actual application.

For this guide I’m going to assume that you’ve got Rails set up and I’m going to be using the environment detailed in my earlier post although you can do much of this with just a basic setup.

So, what are we going to create?

The first tutorial I embarked on was creating a simple blog. This consisted of a main homepage listing recent posts as well as pages for managing and creating posts, I later added the facility to comment on posts and started looking at styling, templates and Javascript to lift the application.

What we’re going to create here is an application called “Gabber”–a simple collaborative micro-blog (a bit like Twitter) that allows people to post a short message and allow everyone to add comments. The reason it’s collaborative is because we’re not going to look at authentication so it’ll be an open system.

You can view the final application at http://gabber.d13design.co.uk/gabber/public/posts.

We were in the garden the other weekend doing a bit of work re-seeding the lawn now all the weeds have died back and Jake started shouting that he’d found some “creepy things”. Not quite sure what he had found, we went to investigate what appeared to be a big mound of soil next to the greenhouse.

As we got closer we noticed it was covered in ants! It appears that one whole half of the nest had slid off revealing the network of tunnels inside.

The ants didn’t look best pleased by this and they were scurrying frantically trying to recover all of the eggs that had rolled out of the main chambers. Just before hosing the whole lot down I managed to grab some quick photos of the ants at work…

I’ve been quite excited by Ruby on Rails for a while now but I’ve never actually had enough time to sit down and figure things out. Well, recently I plucked up the courage and delved in.

There’s tons of tutorials out there helping you get set up and coding with Rails but I found many of the a little hard to follow and, being a designer more than a programmer, I found myself going round in circles with a lot of trial and error. I finally got myself sorted and I thought it might be useful for other people in my boat if I blogged about just what I did.

This post will tell you how I got my Windows based development environment sorted and subsequent blogs will talk you through some of the first little projects I undertook.