Introducing JoyLi.Net
January 23rd, 2007
In conjunction with my wife Lindsay, and our development company, Blue Cockatoo Creative (website in progress), we’re proud to annouce the release of our first, full-fledged Ruby On Rails website, JoyLi.net.
Lindsay created the graphics and the general web design, while I stitched the pages together, created the database and did general rails magic. There’s no real Ajax on the site, though we did include a bit of groovy javascript.
Lindsay talked me into using ThickBox and JQuery instead of the standard Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries which have built-in support in Rails. Her argument was that we’d save time by not forcing users to download those other libraries and I relented, though after we finished I think we both agreed to just use what ships with Rails in the future. If someone goes ahead and fully integrates JQuery into rails, though, we’d stick with it.
Here’s a couple of teaser images:
JoyLi.net took us about 90 hours worth of total effort. It uses mysql and is currently running on FastCGI on Dreamhost. So far we don’t seem to be experiencing the horrible 500 errors that many people get with Dreamhost. I think I may have found a solution to those problems, and I’ll blog about that soon.
For fun, watch the home page for more than 15 seconds or so. Javascript is fun!
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!
6 Responses to “Introducing JoyLi.Net”
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June 10th, 2007 at 07:21 PM I keep getting an Application Error. (I've been a lurker up until now :)
June 10th, 2007 at 07:21 PM Thanks coder! Sigh. In my test app I had to make a modification to the thickbox javascript but didn't make that change in the production version. Holy Crap! I need to follow my own advice better. :) It should be up and running now. Please leave comments if you find it down. Thanks!
June 10th, 2007 at 07:21 PM If you've previously visited JoyLi, please be sure to refresh your cache so that you get the modified version of thickbox.js The problem lies in the way that thickbox tries to showing the loadingAnimation.gif. It just assumes the location of it - and it's wrong. I commented out that line since the images we show are pretty small and don't really need that gif.
June 10th, 2007 at 07:21 PM This is another excellent example of making for damned sure that your production app is not throwing any errors at all. Each time my rails app throw a certain number of errors dispatch.fcgi gets nuked and the site quits working. Hopefully everything will be happily working now. For the next 20 minutes or so at least.
June 28th, 2007 at 08:11 PM
The site looks great! Just wanted to let you know that there is a project to make jQuery more integrated into Rails (http://yehudakatz.com/tags/jquery-on-rails/). Also here is an article on using jQuery with Rails via RJS templates (http://mad.ly/2007/05/17/jquery-ajax-rails/). And here is an article from the same site about using jQuery to produce unobtrusive JavaScript for rails (http://mad.ly/2007/05/21/integrating-jquery-and-rails-javascript-functions-not-view-helpers/).
June 29th, 2007 at 08:58 AM
Thanks Brandon! I’ll check all of that out. :)