What a term… Fall 2006 summary
Where to start? We worked a lot with Ruby on Rails, podcasts, events, and mobile devices. It has been a pretty good term for trying new things. This term I had the pleasure of working with Sasha Papo who is a computer engineering student here at the University of Waterloo. He was the first to prove to me that Ruby on Rails is the right platform for a work environment where you have multiple programmers working independently on the same web app (and we started using Capistrano along with Subversion for version control). In the winter term Catherine Mittelholtz, a co-op software engineer, will let me know for sure if Ruby on Rails works for the long term 
What did we actually do then?
- UW Opinion – A simple blog with community contribution the focus but it must be approved by an editor. Notifications and Kiwi authentication were the cool features here. This isn’t live yet.
- UW Podcast – CPA needed a place to start putting the rapidly growing collection of podcasts that go beyond lectures and such. We could use UW Blogs as the back end but having had time to sort it out yet.
- CPA home page – we redid the CPA home page to feature more of the content that CPA puts out there but don’t feature on the UW home page or in another micro-site that CPA maintains.
- UW Events tweaks – There have been a few things fixed but we also worked on some features such as user profiles, personal calendars, and notifications. It isn’t running smoothly yet but should be in January.
- UW home page tweak – The code for the UW home page has been updated so things float, flash gallery is 5px wider and new, and the page has tightened up its grid structure. The CSS is still messy but its valid and some classes have added some semantics for the final term project…
- UW home page mobile – With the new code in the home page we have added an auto redirect for mobiles. This new version has a number of links that just point to a script that parses out the content on the page by section. That is still being worked on and its open to suggestions. If you want some stuff added let me know and I will see what I can do.
For the first bit of 2007 I hope to go back and add in some features and get a couple apps into RubyForge. There is also a pretty cool project starting in January that I am a part of. A few emails have gone out inviting some students in residence to participate and over the next term I will blog lots more about it.
