My apologies for not blogging in quite some time, ever since the new year I've been quite busy with several other projects. Most notably, leveraging Craigslist to get rid of some excess furniture, preparing for our upcoming Colorado ski trip, enjoying the sweet victory of the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl, and working on the design for a new version of a website for a restaurant. But fear not, I'm still alive and rocking some new Rails code with the help of my faithful Textmate and ever so creative Photoshop software.

So how about this new website, what is it and why am I working on it? Well, a number of years ago I created a website for my father's restaurant. The Cadet Restaurant has been around for over 50 some years and what type of son would I be if I didn't harness my geek-like powers to give the Cadet a good ole home on the internet. Thus, several years ago and prior to the rise of ePartment54 version 2.0, I designed and deployed a website for the restaurant.

Given the timeframe I was working under, it was a Christmas present and Christmas was creeping on a come up, I needed to get something stood up and functional quick, fast, and in a hurry so I conceded on several aspects of the site replacing those sections with a "Under Construction" notice. Since I needed some active content and at the time, was considering PHP for the future scripting language on this site, I decided to roll with it. Did I meet the deadline? Sure did, but since that time I haven't been able to maintain the site at any reasonable level and decided to give the website a new look and feel in a way that best represents the heart and soul of the restaurant.

Since this time, I've gained a greater appreciation for web design and certainly learned some tricks along the way. This time I decided to follow the same approach I did with this website in that I would design everything in Photoshop first and then carve it into HTML and CSS after I was pleased with the design.

While it's still a work in progress, I can at least share the design of the homepage who's internet complexion has been inspired by a series of accidents that led me to create textures and graphics that I hadn't originally intended. My goal was to create a crisp, clean, and faimly oriented feeling for the site. So let's take a look at what's been thrown together in Photoshop for the Cadet homepage.

Now that you've seen the picture, I'll just admit right now that the entire brown wood feel to the middle section was accomplished when I accidently stretched an image across the screen. After looking at it a while, I really liked it, added a spotlight effect to it, and then created a polaroid picture of some kid at the restaurant from a while back. Total accident, but what luck, huh. So this was the canvas I was working from and had to convert it from an image to real web content. Compared to other approaches I've used in the past, I'm still convinced that designing it first and then carving it up later is by far the most efficient technique for me. Here's a shot of the resulting HTML/CSS version.

Pretty much a duplicate of the original design and in some areas, like the menu bar, I tweaked it even more. Total time was about a day to get this all designed and ported to the web. Now that the skeleton template was ready, it's just been a matter of working on the designs for other pages and then taking a few minutes to transform them into real bits.

If I haven't already mentioned, this is all being written in Ruby on Rails, big surprise there. I've run into a number of small stumbling blocks around the way, but with some assistance from the #rubyonrails channel, I've been able to work my way through them pretty quickly. A few takeaways from this experience for me were:

• RESTful resources and using routes to map resources is a huge time saver
• Using resources within namespaces is dangerous, and quite frankly, I'm not a big fan of namespaces when I can pull of the same thing using the routing
• Resources within namespaces that have models outside the namespace fall down and go boom quickly
• DRY up as much as you can
• Write the tests first and then create the web pages

Alright, so what's the status today? Well, I've gotten the main page done, a section of the administration section complete so that my parents can manage the menu and car cruise gallery, and finished up the menu and feedback sections. I've still got quite a ways to go, but right now I'm looking at about 376 lines of production code and 856 lines of testing code.

Over the upcoming weeks, with the exception of when we are skiing at Copper Mountain in Colorado, I plan to finish up the site. Until then, back to the grind I go.