Smallshock: Start small, finish big

On Sunday I hit a Rails milestone when I put up my first website powered by Rails, lawrenceonrails.org.

The website is for Lawrence on Rails; a group of Ruby and 
Rails enthusiasts in Lawrence, Kansas that I help coordinate. Originally, I had the site in HTML because it was only two pages: creating anything more than a couple of HTML pages was overkill. But during last week’s LoR meeting, it occurred to me that I was taking the easy road.

Fellow Lawrencian Phil Martinez and I were discussing the Lawrence Tweetup website, which Phil maintains. He was talking about some upgrades he would like to make to the website in the future, and I asked him what he built the site in. I was fully expecting him to say Wordpress (which is what this site is built in), but was shocked when he told me he built it himself in PHP.

I wasn’t shocked because he’s not capable; he’s certainly more than capable for web development. I was taken aback because he didn’t have to create it himself. He could have just installed Wordpress, Drupal, Typo or any other open source software that would have worked just fine. But, he didn’t. He liked the challenge. He saw the value in creating it from scratch. It makes him a better developer to do it himself.

And like that, I realized I can’t take that easy route anymore. I got started out with a concept I’ve worked on before, but it wasn’t online. That makes a huge difference – you can create some amazing stuff on your computer, but until it’s online, it’s nothing.

There’s nothing special about the LoR website. It won’t win awards, it won’t be sold for a cool million, and I certainly don’t feel good enough to be comfortable with the title of “developer.” But I feel great about this. I’m using Slicehost, which means I had to build the web server from the ground up. With the suggestion of Aaron Sumner, another LoR member, I used the restful_authentication plugin, and the ever so small content management system for the website is MySQL driven. Small, simple, but I’m proud it’s out there.

I’ll continue to build the site with features and enhancements very soon. There’s a lot I’d like to add, such as: RESTful page titles, pretty URLs and storing the sidebar content in the database, as it’s the only thing that’s hard coded to the layout template.

Could I have spent more time to launch the site with the enhancements I mentioned above? Sure. But, I knew that deployment was my achilles heel, so getting something, anything, online was the goal. I almost didn’t make it. I was having some Rails hosting problems (more in a future post), but was inspired to keep going in part from my conversation with Phil, and an article I stumbled upon called 10 Key Takeaways from Getting Real, written about the 37signals book Getting Real. The section that struck a chord from that article? Don’t sweat the small stuff at first, just get something live.

Point taken.

So where do I go from here? I have a slew of ideas that I’d love to create. Will anyone like them? I have no idea. But when I saw my site working yesterday, I thought, “Wow. This is awesome. I want to do this all the time.”

It certainly feels good to get something started. More to come.