Code Spatter

I feel like having WordPress installed has helped to give me real blogging power. I’ve written two articles that I haven’t published yet because I don’t feel like they are ready. These may have gone unwritten if I was still using the old, incomplete blog I wrote myself.

Why this is worthy and the other two aren’t, I still don’t know.

I was looking at my google analytics account and saw that the MTG:DB site was actually getting a little bit of traffic from google. One visitor even spent 40 minutes searching through cards (and I know it wasn’t me since the source was google and not direct). I figured the site could use a few small updates.

I altered the database so that there was only one card in the table even if it was released in multiple versions. It uses the editions table to sort that out. That made the search results a little cleaner since if it only finds one card it will display it.

Just like the old Code Spatter, it was using spaces in the mod-rewrite-pretty links which aren’t so pretty with the %20s all over the url. I replaced those with dashes so it’s more readable.

I like to think of programming languages as tools. It’s always best to use the right tool for the job… but sometimes there isn’t a choice.

Say you have 4 hammers in the toolbox, a JSP hammer, a php hammer, a Ruby hammer, and a Python hammer. The Ruby and Python hammers are nice looking and effective for people who know how to use them but you aren’t comfortable yet. The php hammer is your old trusty go-to hammer. And the JSP hammer gives you splinters every time you use it.

Then your boss says he needs you to hammer some drywall to the house framework, but you have to use the JSP hammer. That’s how I feel at work sometimes.

I installed WordPress since I didn’t have enough time to commit to making MorfU as awesome as I would like. The old Code Spatter layout was also getting stale, so I found some fresh WordPress skins that were listed on this list of 100.

I copied all of the old posts into here and made sure the date was the proper time. The comments don’t display a date, but they would be off since I didn’t bother to make them all correct. The threadedness of the discussion was also lost, but luckily there weren’t many posts using it anyways.

There was an easy-to-add OpenID plugin so everyone can still post comments easily.

Over the 3-day weekend I got together with a group of web developers that have free time on their hands and great ideas to throw around. On various occasions we had talked about how we wanted to make something that would be helpful to many people and maybe even change the world. We knew the last part was a bit of a stretch, but the idea remained the same; use our talent to make an awesome web application. Then we heard about http://startupweekend.com/ and thought it would be a great idea for us to get together and try something similar.

The resulting idea from the weekend was a website where local and global issues could be discussed. Users could post issues that concern them and then users could post proposed solutions to that issue. Those solutions would then be voted on by users and hopefully result in a resolution or plan of action.

We knew there would be a learning curve to getting something going with Ruby on Rails, but we knew it would be easier in the long run and learning a new language is always fun.

The application is named Mobulous and can be found at one of those fancy URLs with the .us domains. At http://Mobulo.us you will currently find a sign up form to be invited to the closed beta (when it happens) and to be notified of the launch of the application.

If you keep checking back there (or here) there will be more teasers thrown up as we have more parts developed.

I hope to resolve some issues with you soon.