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Comment by pstinnett | Hacker News Reader

I just "launched" my first Ruby on Rails application last night. It creates a random playlist of songs from Pitchfork.com's best new albums area. Up to now I've primarily worked with PHP.

A little backstory: Just a little over a month ago I saw Zach Klein (now working at Boxee) tweet this: http://twitter.com/zachklein/status/7770633908

I had been reading through the new railstutorial.org, but I always learn more quickly working on a real project. So I took a stab at the app and here I am.

I'd love to hear any feedback or comments/questions.

Thanks!

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Very nice design.

Looks like pitchfork improved their security a bit. I remember they used to just have an XMPP player, where the XML behind it just had an additional node titled security. It's contents said something to the effect of.. "Don't download these files!". Or something like that.

Thanks. I'm not really sure about Pitchfork's security...I know they lock down their mp3s and had some recent trouble (maybe?) with leaking albums? Not 100% sure on that last part.

All the mp3 files that I'm using are provided by 8tracks.com via their API.

I like the clean design. Do you have a blog with notes of the whole process - plugins used / css / js / hosting.

No blog yet. After I get the first round of revisions done on pitchforked I'll get something up that details the process. I've been taking notes throughout the whole thing, just haven't gotten around to it yet! I'll post again once that's ready.

This is off-topic, but does your mother teach math?

Edit: yes, I believe that is indeed you, patso. I'm Daniel Higginbotham. Neat app. I like the user interface. The "loading" bar is neat.

The icons (notes, price tag/star, calendar) look clickable to me but it seems like they're not.

Dan! Strange meeting on HN! Hope all is going well with you.

The icons aren't clickable but the text underneath click through to the review page. I'll see about making that entire area clickable to keep people from being confused.

Yeah this is strange. I keep thinking of how your mother would get mad at me for reading in her class.

Anyway, feel free to contact me any time about rails or ruby stuff. I've been doing rails work for more than four years now and would be happy to help out. My email's in my profile and my AIM is willmakeawhisper

Haha. I'm sure she doesn't remember that now!

I'll shoot you an email shortly.

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