A screenshot of the Climbhub web application

Climbhub is an online climbing guidebook and social network. It’s a complex web application written in Ruby on Rails and was written from the ground up by myself. It’s very much an early stage beta, but is fully functional - go ahead and sign up if you’re a climber… it’s completely free to join and use and you never know, you just might find out about new first ascents in your area (although at the moment, it’s very much centred around the climbing in South East Cornwall).

In December, myself and some friends made a winter crossing of Crib Goch on the Saturday. We had intended to do the whole Snowdon horseshoe, but came across a couple who were completely out of their depth on the ridge, and ended up having an epic experience rescuing them off the mountain! We finally descended in the dark, having watched the woman come within an inch of a terminal fall down a 700′ gully. Fortunately we had brought a confidence rope up with us, for a less experienced member of our party. If we hadn’t, I dread to think how the day might have panned out. It was certainly a reminder to me of the danger of the hills, but also a great reassurance that if you know what you are doing, and remain calm, you can safely extricate yourself from those dangerous situations and have an all-the-more memorable experience for it.

On the Sunday, three of us climbed Central Trinity route on the Trinity (North) face of Snowdon. A blissful day of lovely snow cramponing conditions up a lovely gully, straight onto the summit of Snowdon.

The trip I made with my brother (staying with a friend already up in North Wales) this month, was all about ice climbing. I knew from my friend in situ in Wales that conditions were in (just), so we headed over into Ogwen and climbed the frozen Nameless Stream, before heading up into the Nameless Cwm and climbing a couple of unknown frozen waterfalls.

Unfortunately, the ice gradually deteriorated as the day wore on, as did the weather, so Sunday was dedicated to walking around the lower level Clwydian hills, which I had never visited before. Still a lovely day though, made even better by some friends from Liverpool popping over to join us.

Work on this site involved the complete development and design of an ecommerce application with back-end CMS, stock and order management, credit card processing and fulfillment. As a developer / designer working alone, such a large task can only be completed thanks to application frameworks. I used the Substruct engine on the Ruby on Rails web application platform. For more information on the open source Ruby on Rails framework and how it can help your business, see my previous post on the subject or get in contact with me.

Visit the Country Lane Hampers website →

We had a fantastic trip and made good time, with no serious incidents. The weather was the typical Alpine mix - sunshine, rain, snow and thunder and lightning; but on the whole was fairly amenable by Alpine trekking standards. We made some great friends and took away a whole host of brilliant experiences.

We had a great couple of days that included climbing Moel Hebog, climbing at Tremadog and meeting Eric Jones, and climbing the Idwal Slabs and continuation wall.

My preferred framework for developing web applications is Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a framework built on a set of conventions for database-backed web application development that are implemented using the Ruby programming language. As open source software, it does have the benefit of being free (as is PHP), meaning savings that can be passed on to clients. However, unlike PHP, the framework has been designed from the ground up to assist in the rapid implementation of complex applications with the maximum of ease.

As a developer who generally works alone, this means I’m able to offer development of much more involved sites than I otherwise would be able to undertake on my own, whilst passing on the cost benefit of hiring a single designer/developer.

Ruby on Rails is opinionated software. That is, the designers of the framework have definite ideas about how a web application should be designed. As long as you follow the conventions laid out by the framework, you are given a huge amount of functionality for free. For example, if you follow the standard Rails naming conventions for database tables, your Ruby on Rails application will automatically understand the relationships between those tables and allow you to query them as such.

Some of the other conventions Rails has adopted include the MVC (Model, View, Controller) approach for separating your programs business logic, resource modelling and presentational views in a clean and easy to maintain manner; and the REST (REpresentation State Transfer) method for implementing a consistent and open API (Application Programming Interface) for facilitating integration from the burgeoning array of web services that make up Web 2.0.

As Rails hit version 2, it adopted REST principles as its default convention. When you use the in-built generators that get you quickly up and running with an application, REST principles are inherently enabled. As such, understanding REST and its Rails implementation has now become a whole lot more important. With the further tuning that came about with the recent release of Rails 2.1, we have a whole new bunch of features (some to do with the REST implementation, some not - such as time zone support) to learn about.

Following are the tutorials I have found most helpful in updating my knowledge of Rails to incorporate best practice REST implementation. Reading the articles (and watching the screencasts) will stand you in good stead for creating a new web application that follows the REST methodology.

LearningRails.com

This site is great whether you are entirely new to Rails, or if you simply want to update your 1.x knowledge in light of the adoption of REST in 2.x. If you are new to Rails, start at the beginning with the podcasts (lessons 1 - 8). These introduce Rails from the ground up… why you might want to use Rails, the idea of convention over configuration, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and MVC. If you’re already familiar with Rails and the aforementioned ideas, skip straight to the screencasts (lessons 9+). The screencasts comprehensively take you through building a CMS (Content Management System) website in a series of easy-to-follow lessons - despite the fact that they are describing some very powerful techniques.

Akita On Rails

Fabio Akita, a Brazilian Rails developer, always seems to be the first person to create tutorials for the latest developments in the Rails world. And indeed, his First Rails 2.0 Screencast is a perfect example. However, the lightning speed of this screencast, whilst capturing a lot of features of the new Rails, is a bit difficult to digest. Much more useful is the accompanying 2 part tutorial article he wrote to support it. Despite English being the author’s second language, this really is an easily understandable article (assuming you are familiar with Rails 1.x), and is the best practice of RESTful Rails that I have come across yet.

A useful follow-up to this article, is the 2 part article he wrote on the new additions in Rails 2.1.

Whether you are interesting in learning Rails yourself, are simply interested in finding out what all the hype is about, or if you are a business that has come across Rails development as an option and would like to know more about it, I hope this post has been of help. If you have any further questions about Ruby on Rails development, such as how it might be useful to you in your business, please get in contact with me.

Many thanks to the authors of the articles mentioned in this post.

I am currently working on a site for Gill Goddard Hair. A modern hair and beauty salon in Totnes. Pop on over to www.moortor-design.co.uk/sites/ggh to take a look at how the site is coming along.

The site has been primarily design-led, it is after all a very style conscious industry. However, I have taken the opportunity to play with some ideas I have been having about improving navigation for the end-user.

In the last couple of years, an interesting technology has appeared on the web design scene. Known as AJAX, it is more accurately a collection of technologies. It stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Essentially, it uses the Javascript functionality of modern browsers, to do things that are beyond the capabilities of the static HTML mark-up language that is used to describe web pages.

For the GGH website, the particular aspect of AJAX I have made use of, is it’s ability to load content into the web page without having to refresh the browser. The way in which I have coded the GGH site means that there is actually only a single page being requested by the web browser… as the user clicks to view different areas of the website, certain portions are loaded in on the fly (the browser doesn’t have to refresh or reload). This makes the navigation far more responsive than normal, without significantly breaking the traditional paradigm of a web page that we are all used to.

Another aspect of this Javascript trickery, is that we can make use of realtime manipulation of the make-up of the web page (known as the Document Object Model or DOM). To cut a long story short, this means we can create visual effects such as animated slides. If you look at the GGH site, you’ll see that as you choose a new section, the content doesn’t just appear, it slides in and out with a funky, springing animation effect. Pointless eye-candy? Maybe, but I think it’s in keeping with the modern look required for this particular site.

A final important consideration, is that the user might be using a browser that doesn’t support Javascript, or have chosen to turn Javascript off. Even if this is the case, the page degrades gracefully to show all the content they would otherwise miss. Accessibility is a very important facet of web design and simply can’t be dismissed.

Please get in touch with me if you would like to know more about how the techniques described here could help you or your business.

I’ve begun working with a fantastic illustrator called Andy Hunt. Andy is one of the guys responsible for creating Gordon the Gopher. For a quick look at some of Andy’s illustrations, head over to www.andyhunt.com. At the moment this is a holding page in lieu of some much more interesting work to come…

I got back late last night from a weekend away in North Wales. As a keen climber / mountaineer, myself and a few like-minded friends have taken to regular weekend jaunts to North Wales - leaving on a Friday night after work and getting back Sunday evening.

This particular trip had been envisioned as the first ’summer’ trip of the year, after an excellent winter season that saw us enjoying the great snow conditions in Scotland and other places. We did get some rock climbing done on the Saturday, but awoke on the Sunday morning to find a layer of snow outside the hut, and more falling as great big snowflakes! The idea of climbing Ampthitheatre Buttress was soon dismissed, and instead we made a very pleasurable ascent of Y Garn in full winter garb. A real unexpected treat at the end of an already great winter season.

From time to time, I may also drop in the odd post about other things I get up to that might be of interest to anybody thinking of working with me. It’s always a good idea to know a little bit about the character of a person you might be working closely with!