Rails 3 Success and Never giving up

Rails
1

Hi All,

It’s been a little more than 2 years since I first started working with
Ruby on Rails. At that time, I was out of work and looking to get
involved with development rather than infrastructure. Lo and behold,
the Ruby language and the Rails framework was something that held a lot
of interest to me. Being out of work at the time, I read several books
over a weeks time and started my first reborn project that culminated
from years of working with statistics for college football in a PHP
driven site. In 2 to 3 months, I had my first rails 2.x production site
going and it was a solid success.

Today I look back at what I accomplished and what I have built today and
would like to showcase both production sites that I now work solely on.
I am the sole developer, creator, administrator, and owner of these
sites and they were built with Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.10.

http://nflstatpages.com
http://ncaastatpages.com (this was my first rails production site)

Both sites use html5, no flash, jquery, jquery mobile, and some custom
components I built on my own. They are also fully integrated with
oauth and have applications built in facebook, twitter, and I’m now
working on a google plus variant. In addition, I built a zong api
framework to handle mobile phone payments and was pleasantly surprised
when paypal ended up purchasing them.

I didn’t want to promote my sites (even though football season is right
around the corner), but I wanted to show others that if you have an
idea,
maintain drive, put effort into everything you do each day, you can
become successful. I now work as an infrastructure and systems
administrator for a high profile company on my normal time, and continue
to build my stats sites on my spare time. The sites I’ve built are
valued right now at about a quarter of a million dollars and continue to
grow. The total operating expenses are less than $5k per year for both
combined.

It doesn’t take much to work on a successful project so long as you have
a tangible idea that is worth investing in. I’m hoping that in 3 to 5
years I’ll be able to fully leave my job and work 100% on my sites,
competing with Accuscore who I’ve successfully beaten in straight
predictions going on 2 years now.

Take care and happy coding. I believe in ideas and success. I hope you
do too.

2

Nice.

I don’t know if you care, but the ‘Login’ and ‘Register’ links are not
positioned correctly in Safari 5.0.5. They are stacked on top of each
other like this:

Log In |
Register

which makes the Register link spill out below the black tab–and it’s
not dependent on my browser width. When I view the links in Firefox
3.5.7, they are positioned correctly:

Log in | Register

3

On 23 August 2011 07:29, 7stud – [email protected] wrote:

Nice.

I don’t know if you care, but the ‘Login’ and ‘Register’ links are not
positioned correctly in Safari 5.05. They are stacked on top of each
other like this:

Log In |
Register

Possibly related

and

Colin

4

–wrong thread

5

Congrats! An uplifting tale.

-R

Sent from my iPhone

6

Thanks guys. :slight_smile:

The iframe validation errors are actually facebook’s issues,
unfortunately. I may build a custom block just to fix those validation
errors down the road.

I’ll look into the 5.0.5 Safari quirks. I’ve tested in IE, Mozilla,
Chrome, and Safari 5.0.5. I don’t have the issues you are showing in my
safari 5.0.5. Are you running yours from a MAC? I’m running safari
from PC with no issues.

Strange.

7

Alpha B. wrote in post #1018004:

Thanks guys. :slight_smile:

The iframe validation errors are actually facebook’s issues,
unfortunately. I may build a custom block just to fix those validation
errors down the road.

I’ll look into the 5.0.5 Safari quirks. I’ve tested in IE, Mozilla,
Chrome, and Safari 5.0.5. I don’t have the issues you are showing in my
safari 5.0.5. Are you running yours from a MAC?

Yes. OSX 10.6.7.

8

+1

9

7stud – wrote in post #1018118:

Alpha B. wrote in post #1018004:

Thanks guys. :slight_smile:

The iframe validation errors are actually facebook’s issues,
unfortunately. I may build a custom block just to fix those validation
errors down the road.

I’ll look into the 5.0.5 Safari quirks. I’ve tested in IE, Mozilla,
Chrome, and Safari 5.0.5. I don’t have the issues you are showing in my
safari 5.0.5. Are you running yours from a MAC?

Yes. OSX 10.6.7.

Same issue in Safari 5.1 on OS X 10.7.1 (Lion). This probably has
nothing to do with a Safari quirk, but rather a font rending difference
between Windows and Mac OS. Spacing is certainly different on the two
platforms.

I overrode the stylesheet using Safari 5.1 Web Inspector and changed the
font from Andale Mono to Helvetica and the text rendered on a single
line. It’s likely that font is taking more horizontal space on the Mac
than on Windows.

10

Robert W. wrote in post #1018137:

I overrode the stylesheet using Safari 5.1 Web Inspector and changed the
font from Andale Mono to Helvetica and the text rendered on a single
line. It’s likely that font is taking more horizontal space on the Mac
than on Windows.

Wouldn’t that be a problem in Firefox as well then? Yet, the
positioning is fine when I view the page with Firefox.

11

Hmmm…Safari also has something in the View menu that says “Zoom Text
only”. If I check that (without doing anything else), all the graphics
immediately get bigger, including the black tab, and the links align
horizontally. Then if I View>Zoom in, only the text gets bigger and at
some point the text gets too big for the black tab, and the links are
split in half and stack on top of each other.

So maybe check your settings in the View menu in Safari on windows to
see if that is the reason for the differences between mac Safari and
windows Safari. When ‘View>Zoom Text only’ is unchecked that is when
I
see the links split in half and stacked on top of each other.

12

Hi guys - thanks for the troubleshooting help. I found that on windows
the view zoom menu has no ill effects when fully zoomed out and fully
zommed in. It definitely appears that it’s a slightly wider font
difference on Mac vs. Windows which is strange to me since it’s a very
safe web font.

I created a small hack for safari browsers only for the login panel
which should fix the mac difference using:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0){
#open { font: normal 10px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif !important; }
}

13

More info: If I change the text size by zooming in (View>Zoom in), then
at some point there is enough room and the links align horizontally on
one line.

14

On Aug 22, 2011, at 8:26 PM, Alpha B. wrote:

going and it was a solid success.

looks really nice - thanks for sharing and good luck

Craig

15

Looks good. If I zoom all the way out, so that everything gets really
small, on the very last size the links stack on top of each other again.
Because I doubt anyone will view your page at that size, it probably
isn’t worth sweating.