Week 10 - Forum App - devise, haml, simple_form, bootstrap-sass, heroku, normalize.css

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of 12 apps in 12 weeks.  I'm your host Kenyacode and this is week 10.  Yesterday I made a forum site.  If you have been reading this blog since week one or have been doing the challenge yourself, you should have see that many of these apps share much of their functionality.  The forum app has posts and comments, just like the blog app, the raddit app, and the movie review app.  Websites can very different in content but be very similar in functionality.

Again I made a landing page that tells users and visitors what the site is about.  I plan to add a landing page to all 12 websites.  It just makes sense.

Here is the page you see when you log in.

Here is the show page for each Forum post.

What I had to figure out in this app was how to use normalize with bootstrap.  First I just imported bootstrap and bootstrap sprockets into the application.css.scss file at the bottom of the normalize imports.  Well that changed fonts and sizes for the rest of my page.  After 30 min I realized I needed to have the bootstrap on top of the normalize so normalize could override bootstrap.

Now it works great.

Features I would like to add:

1. Get avatars for users

2. Give users chat functionality.

3. List users currently online

4. To have this be part of my episodic app that i'm building. Hence why I named it episodic-forum.

5. Linking the tv show to its corresponding page on the forum.

6. This app would be good to incorporate AJAX.

Tune in next week, same app time same app url,

Kenyacode

Technologies used: devise, haml, simple_form, bootstrap-sass, heroku, normalize.css
Github page: https://github.com/kenyacode/forum

Week 8 - Workout Log - Haml, simple_form, bootstrap-sass, puma, postgreSQL

Click here to go to website

Yesterday I finished the 8 app in Mackenzie Childs 12 apps in 12 weeks challenge.  The workout log has shown me that I have learned a lot and that I am much faster at programming than I was 8 weeks ago.

Last week I went to Carbon Five's Hack Night, a meet-up in Santa Monica. Michael Wynholds was speaking on date-time in code.  I had no idea that time had so many elements to it.  Is it the current time? A time ago? Do you want the time from the timezone where the user is or the server or the company? That talk came in handy when building this app as it allowed me to search for different ways to interpret date time than was shown in Mackenzie's tutorial.

This is a simple_form for a workout.  Line 2 is the input field for date.  The date used in the tutorial was formatted 2014-10-26 11:47:00 UTC. (see green image below) No one reads date time like that so I changed not only the displayed date time, but the drop down menu to input it as well. (see blue image below)

One look at his design and I knew I had to brighten the colors and add forms divs to make it look nice and neat.  I put a table in the first form with the workout info, then made a second form with the exercise info, then a third form with the form partial.

If you are wondering how I did it, I found a great blog by Akshay Mohite that had all the date-times in ruby displayed. https://hackhands.com/format-datetime-ruby/

Features I would love to add:

1. Add users

2. Drop down list of exercises, based on Body Section.

3. Social media shareability

4. Search Functionality

5. Edit and update each exercise

Until next time, Kwaheri (see you later)

Kenyacode

Technologies used: Haml, simple_form, bootstrap-sass, puma, postgreSQL
Github Page: https://github.com/kenyacode/workout