I’ll be spending more time learning Ruby on Rails now that I’ve sent the book to press, so I guess I’ll go back to reading Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby. It doesn’t seem like it’ll be that hard to pick up, really. What I need is an idea for a Rails project that I’ll actually use. Hmm… Ah, I’ve got it: I send out a weekly newsletter to my ward and provide a list of date ideas in it. There are plenty of recurring events which I have to type in again and again, and so it’d be nice to store the events in a database and then just export the list each week when I need it. (I talked about an idea like this on Top of the Mountains last week.) You know, it may be good to expose the site to the ward members and give them access to add date ideas (and tag existing ones). It looks like I’ll need two tables: one for dates and one for users. Simple enough. Hmm, what other functionality will I need? From a user’s standpoint, I’d want to be able to search for dates and limit results by cost, time of day, category, etc. Would I need to bookmark dates? Probably not, since most people will be checking the site on a weekly basis and a week isn’t enough time to warrant more permanent links. It’d be nice to have an RSS feed for new date ideas… It’d also be nice to interface with Google Maps, either directly (like Frappr) or via normal links. Okay, I’d better get back to class, but I’ll write more about this later.
[tags]Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Google Maps, Frappr[/tags]