Archive for December, 2007

13
Dec
07

Cleveland Ruby Users Group – Presentation Companion notes

Here are my companion notes to my presentation at the Cleveland Ruby Users Group.

Good books for learning Ruby:
The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) by Peter Cooper
Ruby for Rails by David Black – good if you have experience with Ruby on Rails and would like to learn Ruby

Good web sites for learning Ruby:
6 free videos learning Ruby
Ruby Quiz
RubyLearning.com
online IRB
My del.icio.us bookmarks. Look under Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Ruby IDEs
ConFreaks – free Ruby related Conference videos.

Thanks.
Mike Riley

01
Dec
07

As promised. The designs.

As I promised a while back. Here are some of the designs I considered for my site.

Here is one attempt at a design. This version was going for the old worn out aged photo look.

This version was close to the final version. This was actually what I was going to use right before I got to my final design.

This was just an attempt. I often just try things to see if anything catches my eye and see if it can grow from there.

This was my first attempt and I actually still really like it. Fake tape holding up a scrap piece of paper. Nice effect. Others use this and I felt it wasn’t unique enough.

I think this one is nice. Just wasn’t sure about the sub pages. I really like sites that have some differentiation from the home page to the other sub pages. You see this with newspapers in how they are designed.

Was going for the grunge, worn paper look here. Wasn’t really happy with the results

Was going for a grunge, typographic look with this design. Wasn’t thrilled with how it turned out.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

I did a lot of designs for this latest version of my site. I liked some, indifferent towards some and didn’t like others. I just took time, experimented and tried things. You never know where the design is going to take you. You just have to get working. I find my design process is helped by looking at other designs. Whether it’s print or web. Once I look at enough stuff I get into the mindset and feel much more creative. Hope this has been informative for you. My current state is finishing off the current version of the site and then going to refactor the code and re-implement a new architecture for the site. I have learned a lot about Capistrano, Ruby on Rails and deployment. I am going to take this new found knowledge and apply it to the next version of the site.

thanks for taking the time to read this.