Wa-hoo, I learned something today, and half the reason why I chose to blog this is so that I don't forget. Lately I have repeatedly attempted to create a scaffold with Locomotive without success. At first I thought that I had accidentally ruined the config by adding a flickr gem I was experimenting with, but I don't think that is so. The problem I had is with the msqlite schema in schema.sql and how I tried to update it and then generate a scaffold. First off here is the current schema.sql I have:

DROP TABLE monkeys;
create table monkeys (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100));

DROP TABLE products;
create table products (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY not null,
title varchar(100) not null,
description text not null,
image_url varchar(200) not null,
price decimal(10,2) not null,
date_available datetime not null
);

DROP TABLE dogs;
create table dogs (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100));

DROP TABLE cats;
create table cats (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100));

DROP TABLE wdwresorts;
create table wdwresorts (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
loc varchar(100));

Here are the steps I need to take in the future to avoid problems:

1. Create the structure of the table before anything else.
   
2. cd into the db directory of the app
   
3. Execute this command: sqlite mydb < schema.sql
   
4. Execute: cd..
   
5. Execute: ruby script/generate scaffold [controllerName] [urlDirectory]
   

Today I take a tour of the social review website, yelp.com. Yelp offers a place on the web to share your opinions of restaurants and businesses in your area. The first step is to make a profile of yourself,

Earlier, I wrote about starting up Ruby on Rails to be difficult. Having chatted with a few who know, I have somewhat changed my tune. This Ruby on Rails stuff is pretty good. It reminds me of the simplicity of the Roxen webserver, but that's old tech with a smaller community around it. Two bad things. So, out with the old, and into the new. The people on the IRC channel, #rubyonrails, has been able to help me with a few questions I had, like how do I get around all the configuration problems. I figured that since the community is all about getting things done, someone would figure out a better solution than manual installation for the Mac, and yup someone did, Locomotive, by Ryan Raaum. Just download it and drag it to the applications folder, sweet! It's a self contained application, including a webserver and a DB.

I got through the first seven chapters of Agile Web Development with Rails, enough to know how to create a website that uses a database to fill in the slots of a nice-looking page, not quite enough to create a cart or a session -- that's covered in the next chapters. I think I will take a break from studying and try to implement my new knowledge.

It's after midnight. So if something I type doesn't make sense, please let me know. The Entrepeneurial meetup was a lot of fun tonight. I met a lot of interesting people. I kept telling myself to shutup and listen, but I was having way too much fun participating in the conversation.

For the most part, the conversation centered on getting things done on the Internet, but each person had his or her own angle. Sitting next to Gil, the host, I started things off by attempting to describe my idea for a travel site that provided a local point of view. Several suggestions were brought up on how to attract and keep and audience, as well as possible ways to monetize the site's traffic. Next we talked about an ePionions-like site, but for small items like peanut butter, shaving cream and such. It sounds like a small idea, but several members of the group mentioned ways on how to present the items in a way that attracts a market segment. Next up, Joel mentioned that he and some partners had bought, improved and sold some properties. He sees an opportunity to market software that teaches the new investor about the how to make a business of investing in real estate. The software would use traditonal instruction and role playing simulation. Vincent then told us about how he just finished working for IBM in product development of software for locating the right human resources for projects IBM is working on. The answer lies in the metadata and having a lot of it. Kevin Savetz and Mariva H. Aviram talked about their two successful sites, Free After Rebate Info and Mariva's Guide. Besides illuminating the topic of how a money-making site is run, these two pointed out the fact that good content needs money to fuel it to pay for good writing. At a dollar per word (yup, that's the going rate, according to Mariva), a series of short articles can get expensive. Kevin and Mariva hope to find an angel investor to free her up and let a good writer fill Kevin's pages with great content.

Speaking of angel investors, the next person in the line-up (sorry, I cannot remember his name) says that there is no such thing. In fact when you go talk to someone about venture capital, bring a lawyer.

There were a few more people at the meetup, but my eyes grow tired and I cannot hold off sleep any more...

I have seen the rails demo of the creation, from scratch, of the framework and a couple entries to a blog in 15 minutes. Cool stuff. I just wish that I had someone show me how to do it on Site5. I seem to using Google and A9 a bit too much. Once I get the hang of rails, I imagine that I will producing websites at warp speed!

I set the initial config of localyokel

Today I opened CarlBTanner.net