Update on the Rails – Blogger Project

Ruby on Rails
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the rails – blogger project and, while you could certainly check github yourself, I thought getting an update from me would be helpful. By giving you an update myself, I can explain
  • What I initially planned that I figured out won’t work
  • What I plan to do from here
Please note that I’m still learning ruby and rails so some of my code and thoughts on what to do may look terrible to somebody who’s an experienced ruby/rails developer. If that’s you and you see something cringeworthy, please let me know and point me to where I can find out how to be better.

What I Initially Planned

My plan of attack had been to:
  • Create a test Google account.
    • CHECK! See here. As a side note, I’m surprised that name wasn’t taken already
  • Implement a sign up page for a blog to be pulled.
    • CHECK!
  • Tests for the “sign up” page
    • Some basic tests done.
  • Implement the API calls for the blog
    • CHECK!
    • This was an opportunity to figure out migrations to add fields that I’d forgotten.
    • See below for why this has caused me to re-think why I’m doing what I’m doing.
  • Implement a page to display the blog information
    • CHECK, sort of!
  • TESTS!
    • This one is too generic but the idea is good. I’m figuring out how to test rails apps as I figure out how to write rails apps.
  • Setup hosting for the site so that I can share the results of it here.
    • Not done yet because I don’t feel comfortable showing this off yet.

What Has Changed

The blog object of the Blogger API is meant to give the general information/meta-data about the blog. My initial plan was to create a model that mirrored this data so that I don’t have to ask Blogger for this information every time I want to display it. I realized while I was mapping the fields from the Blog object from Blogger to my blog object that I’d forgotten the name field of the Blog object. While creating a migration to fix this isn’t that much of a problem, it got me thinking whether I need to have everything from the Blog object. Given that I’m working my way through the API from the top level of information, I think I’ll keep the info as is. Because the main effort I’ve expended in doing this project is learning what to do, re-writing the app at a later date would probably be good practice and would allow me to to only keep the parts I need given lessons learned during this trial.

What’s Next?

  1. Make sure that the BlogUrl object gets updated with the id of the blog then saved.
  2. Make the pages look decent (and, as a side effect, learn a little CSS)
  3. Search for places that make sense to add tests
    1. Fix the current test of Blog.from_blogger() and add some assertions to it
    2. Add some tests (including a bad blog url)
  4. Get the site hosted.

Ending Notes

Thanks for making it this far!
As I mentioned before, please feel free to let me know if you see something in either my code or my methodology that warrants some help. I’m still learning and look forward to talking to you all. Ways you can reach me:
  1. Comments here regarding this specific post
  2. Email: [email protected]
  3. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trprice.consulting/
  4. Twitter: @TRPriceSoftware

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