About this repository

Overview

This repository holds the codebase that used to support my website. It is written in Ruby on Rails, currently using version 7.0.4.

I say "used to" because, in April 2023 I completed converting my site to use Jekyll.

The application used to run on Heroku using a Postgres database, MemCachier for caching, Papertrail for logging, and Twilio SendGrid for sending emails. I forget where I initially deployed it to back in 2007!

It is a relatively simple Rails application that has served its purpose over the intervening years.

Below I explain the features of the application, its history, and some notes about the codebase.

Keith Pitty

6 April, 2023

Code Health

Code Climate

The repository makes use of Code Climate's Quality product, which shows that this codebase rates highly for maintainability and test coverage.

Features

Public facing

The public faces site provides the following:

• a navigation menu at the top of the layout;
• a home page;
• the latest blog post;
• a comment form for posts that have this feature switched on;
• a list of all blog posts, dating back to 2008;
• a page detailing information about my work history;
• a list of testimonials from others;
• a form for users to contact me

Admin UI

The admin UI provides me, when logged in, to:

• add and update achievements that are displayed on the public About page;
• add and update testimonials;
• draft and publish blog posts;
• enable or disable comments on blog posts;
• view comments and remove those that have been caught as spam;
• add images

Redundant feature

The repository contains some redundant code for a feature that is no longer supported:

• an RSS feed

One day I may revive it.

History

I first developed this application in 2007, using Rails 1.2. This predated git! My initial commits were made using Subversion.

I've endeavoured to maintain and upgrade the application since then. Some blog posts that I've written along the way that describe such maintenance include:

• My initial blog post, which focussed on my attempts to improve the visual design but also noted that I had added a blog;
• Notes about upgrading the application to Rails 3;
• An admission that web design is not a skill in my sweetspot with the resultant switch to Twitter Bootstrap;
• How I adopted Tailwind CSS

I'll provide some notes below about the codebase with more focus on the back-end.

Notes about the codebase

Models

• Achievement includes straight-forward validation;
• BlogPost includes:
  • has_many relationship with comments;
  • validation;
  • scopes for published and draft posts;
  • several public and private instance methods
• Comment includes:
  • belongs_to relationship with blog post;
  • makes use of rakismet gem;
  • validation, using regex for email validation
• Contact includes straight-forward validation;
• Image stores images on S3, using Active Storage
• Testimonial includes straight-forward validation;
• User and UserSession make use of the authlogic gem

Controllers

• Admin::AchievementsController enables CRUD for achievements;
• Admin::BlogPostsController enables CRUD for blog posts, expiring fragment caches where appropriate;
• Admin::CommentsController enables management of comments, many of which will have been marked as spam;
• Admin::ImagesController facilitates creation and removal of images from S3;
• Admin::TestimonialsController enables CRUD for testimonials;
• Blog::ArchivesController includes:
  • index and show methods to support blog archives list and individual blog post pages;
  • a create_comment method, which expires fragment caches in the process of responding to the submission of a comment form;
• AboutController supports the About page by including achievements;
• AdminLayoutController ensures that a user must be logged in to gain access to the admin features;
• ApplicationController contains common methods used by other controllers;
• BlogController redirects to the latest published post;
• BlogPostsController redirects a request to show a blog post to the Blog::ArchivesController;
• ContactsController enables a message from the Contact page to be saved and emailed;
• HomeController supports the home page by retrieving the latest three published posts;
• TestimonialsController supports the Testimonials page;
• UserSessionsController supports sessions for the admin user

Views

Some points to note:

• The views that include forms make use of the simple_form gem;
• Tailwind CSS styles are used;
• Several shared partials are used;
• Helper methods are used to enable code syntax highlighting via the coderay gem;
• The view code in app/views/blog/archives/show.html.erb makes use of caching of comments;
• Navigation is provided at the bottom of a post to previous and next posts

Helpers

• Several useful helper methods are provided to views in ApplicationHelper;
• EmojiHelper enables Slack style emoji text to be translated into the matching image. See this post for an example of usage

Caching

• Fragment caching is used within many of the views for the public-facing pages;
• In production, this is supported by the MemCachier Heroku add-on

Mailers

The CommentMailer and ContactMailer classes support sending email resulting from submitting comment and contact forms.

Specs

The following types of RSpec automated tests are run on CircleCI:

• unit tests of the Admin controllers;
• unit tests for some of the actions of controllers that support the public facing pages;
• unit tests for helper methods;
• unit tests for the methods on the BlogPost model;
• feature tests for:
  • an admin user logging in and out;
  • an admin user creating a blog post;
  • a public user submitting a comment;
  • a public user visiting all parts of the site

Specs are supported by the factory_bot_rails gem.