v558

We tweaked the display of the notice and error messages at the tops of the page.

There is a difficult balance between spending time on the design and spending time on the inner workings that really make the service work. Ultimately, there will be a better design for the whole site, but we don’t want the beta site to be ugly.

Site design we like:

Jamy Ian Swiss

The Daily Beast

Wilson Miner

Some day the closebunch service will just be clicking along, working, and we’ll hire an inciredible designer and the site will be the sort of subdued flashy layout that we want. Until then it will stay pretty basic. (SoCal natives will note the reference to Ralph’s generic brand across the top.)

When a user is invited to a closebunch and they are not yet a user on the closebunch site an account is formed automatically. As is now common on the web it is necessary to protect against people signing people up without their consent (so we don’t get president@whitehouse.gov invited to a closebunch and start spamming the executive branch). That worked fine except there were two messages that went out, one about the invitation to the closebunch and one about the account on closebunch.

People who only really paid attention to their account note would activate their account, but they wouldn’t reply to the invitation to the closebunch. Now when a user activates their account it will automatically accept the invitation to a closebunch (as long as there is only one to accept).

Colin coding:

def [] record_id
   (record_id.nil?) ? nil : self.find(:all,:conditions => {:id => record_id.to_i})[0]
end

I have no idea how bad that code is to write. Maybe there are Ruby on Rails people who are now cringing in their seats trying to think of how to politely tell me I’ve lost my bearings. For me, after a year of writing Ruby, it makes sense. I kept writing that code over and over, a couple lines to find a record in a table if I had an id to look for it. Now I can treat the model like a big array and just say

u = User[4]

That looks so much better than 

id = params[:id]

u = User.find(:all,:conditions => {:id => id}) unless id.nil?

right? Right. But I have a feeling it is not the cool way to do things in Rails. Ah well, that will have to be someone else’s problem to clean up. Right now it makes things so much simpler to read.

~ by Colin on October 24, 2008.