Design questions on creating digg.com-like URLs (are they co

Rails
1

Hi everyone, I’m working on creating a site that functions similar to
digg.com (please no “no more digg clones” remarks please! :slight_smile: ). One
thing I really like about digg is there URLs are very nice to read and I
would like to emulate that without having a lot of actions spread out
all over my application.

So in my app I have three main resources:

Users, Tags, and Items (equivalent of digg’s bookmarks)

I want to create URLs that look like this:

/views/:when (where :when can be (today|week|month|year|upcoming) )
/tags/:tags/:when (:when same as before and :tags like
rails+ruby+hannson)
/users/:username/:type ( where :type can be
(voted|submitted|commented|homepage)
/users/:username/friends/:type (:type same as before)

I guess some obvious other ones are /users/:username/tags/:tags/:when
and /users/:username/friends/:tags/:when

So given this URL design system, what kind of routes would one need and
approximately how many actions (spread out over how many controllers -
should I just have them all in the ItemsController)? I’m currently
thinking of having four actions under the ItemsController (tags, view,
user, userfriends), but I’m not sure if this is enough or too many.
Because other than the top tab/subtab part of the view everything
beneath that is the same (summaries of the items).

Apologies on the long post, I’m the kind of person that if I don’t have
something figured out before I jump in I kind of get into
analysis-paralysis mode so even some confirmation that this system makes
sense would really help!

Thanks!

-C

2

Hasn’t anybody created an acts_as_digg plugin yet?!?

Joe

3

Hi,

I just saw your post, and I’m going to be working on a digg-clone for
a
client too over the next month. I haven’t figured out the answer to
your
question yet, but I wouldn’t mind exchanging design ideas throughout the
process if you’re interested

-Sidney

4

You could try using a single main action in each controller, probably
‘list’ or something equivalent, that can take a hash of conditions to
use as its finder string.

I’d say limit the controllers to things you are actually displaying.
So mostly, people will be looking at items, right? So most of those
urls are just ways of filtering down item views.

So you’d build routes like:

map.connect ‘views/:when’, :controller=>‘items’,
:action=>‘filter_by_time’

and then build actions like:

ItemsController < ApplicationController

def filter_by_time
conditions = { ‘posted’ => params[:when] }
list
end

def list(conditions = {})
Item.find(:all,:conditions=>conditions)
end

I’m not sure if that would work out quite right for you or not, but it
seems like the way to go. You might have to build in more parameters
for the finder, especially for taggable items, but I think that would
probably work fairly well.

Of course, I could be totally wrong! Either way, hopefully this helps
you.

caleb

On 8/24/06, Catelyn S. [email protected] wrote:

Users, Tags, and Items (equivalent of digg’s bookmarks)
and /users/:username/friends/:tags/:when
something figured out before I jump in I kind of get into
analysis-paralysis mode so even some confirmation that this system makes
sense would really help!

Thanks!

-C

–
caleb
http://www.ruejulesverne.com