ND.edu is now live. The effort has been tremendous by the entire team over the past few weeks. Very exciting. I’ll write up an article with some technical info later. I’m too tired right now. For now, you can check it out and leave feedback on the about this site page.
Matt mentioned it a bit but I haven’t. We are currently working on a nd.edu redesign. The launch date is set and sometime this week we are going into a private beta/internal review to cross our t’s and dot our i’s. The entire team has been busting their butts on this effort, putting in countless late nights. In fact, right now it’s about 2:20AM. I just got home 45 minutes ago from the office and Bill is still pushing through the night on the last audience page. We are tired, goofy, frustrated and happy, sometimes all within a few minutes. The past couple days I have recorded a few short happenings so that I can remember what we went through. Below I embedded a few for you to enjoy. Also, rest assured when this sucker is live I will be posting about it here and it will rock you!
Here’s a little tip if you want to see some serious web 2.0 action for a good cause (I hate myself for saying web 2.0): Today, at 1:15PM, the Notre Dame Forum on the Global Health Crisis is going to be webcast live on the Forum website.
On the left side of the webcast is an area where you can take your own notes and on the right is a photos area that live updates as pictures get added. This page is streaming video (it is the year of video), ajax live updating photos, and using ajax to save all your notes for the forum (it will even email you all your notes with timestamps after things settle down).
If you are on campus, go to the forum and if you aren’t, watch the live webcast and enjoy some web 2.0 goodness (ok, I promise I will never say that again on this blog).
There are three types of caching built into Rails (Page, Action and Fragment). Others have written about them in detail so I won’t here. What I will speak of is how I handled caching on the Notre Dame Web Group’s latest creation.
Page caching is very agressive. All that is required to use page caching in a Ruby on Rails application is to add a call (caches_page :index) in your controller. Yep, that’s it. Not only is it instant, but it caches the entire page and stores it as an html file in your public folder. I remember learning about page caching in the Chicago Rails Studio and having one of those, that is so simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of that moments.
I knew the Forum’s website would receive far more traffic than updates, so I decided to use full page caching and then blow away the entire cache whenever certain model records were modified. This approach solved the issue of having to figure out what pages needed to be expired and what pages didn’t. What evolved is a really simple plugin which worked great, so I thought I would share it.
script/plugin install http://svn.addictedtonew.com/public/plugins/addicted_to_caching/Because page caching uses the public folder to store it’s cached files, all that is need to clear the entire cache is to remove each entry (file or folder) in the public folder that is not suppose to exist. The plugin contains a PROTECTED_ENTRIES array which determines which entries are not to be deleted in the public folder.
Addicted to New is the personal website of John Nunemaker, a Web Developer enamored of Ruby on Rails and a wide-eyed fan of all things new and cool.
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