Yes I feel the need to take a holiday, So after working hard on my RGB Tan Im off to Castaway island for 10days for a little R and R.
I will be away from the internet too EEEEEKKKKKK! so I am off to play a little Battlefield II then to sleep. Ill be thinking of you all from the sandy shores.
In the mean time check out tickle.co.nz or my personal gallery http://www.tickle.co.nz/photos/cam and bask in some web2.1 rays lol.
Seeyoooooo!
TICKLE.CO.NZ Ok so I was doing contracting to righthemisphere when a guy contacted me at bluespark.co.nz. He found me through this very blog. He started telling us how he was hoping to redesign his photo printing website tickle.co.nz. In the first instance we had to turn down the offer to remake this site down as dealines were to tight, but they came back to us with an offer that we could accept (more time).
I had been following ruby on rails and saw this as the perfect time to use it. So we did. It was a love hate relationship at first but now that the initail ground work has been laid down and I have a deeper understanding of the lanuage its all love here baby. Flash was used for the gallery too (with many many more features to come). This is verson 1.0 remember. But any comments are welcome. We worked hard on trying to make things easy, interesting and fun. This is the tickle way. So go join up, login and try building an order (you dont actually have to go all the way and pay for it if you dont want to).
Some piccies:
The Home/login screen
The Gallery in flash baby! Yeah.
The checkout ahhh laaa Ajax
The payment page with address confirmation shown on a real envelope ( so you actually can see where its going not a silly form) , and my favorite feature… the sales docket which shows what you bought.
Aswell as the website there was also a processing engine to build. The old system used a proprietry photo system, a server side solution which made printable photobooks. I had to also replace this. I made a .NET processing engine that runs off of a message queue. Jobs are placed on the queue after an order is made and processed 1 by 1 with retries and error reporting. It packages off photos to be printed and sends them off to the photo printing lab for printing. It also takes information from a flash product builder and turns them into print ready pdfs, complete with formatted text and images. and sends them off to the assigned printer.
I also had the mamoth task of deciding on a server setup. It had to be windows for the .NET engine (but this can be separated out to its own machine if the load gets to high, nice and encapsulated). I ended up going with a Ruby server called Mongrel sitting in behind an apache webserver. At this point the traffic is low, but when it starts to get higher I will move to a managed cluster of mongrel servers being served up through Apache. I am really please with the whole setup as things can be removed to their own machines if the load ever requires this.
So from start to finish (and other projects on the go aswell) we spent about three months on the site. Remember thats design, a new lanuage, a processing engine capable of sendin g off photo orders, and turning flash objects into pdfs, building the server and environment, along with credit card processing. Not hugely fast but now that the ruby on rail side is under control I think I could cut that right down. The site now seems really small but this is only after many discussions between Johno and myself as to what the site was about and what it should do. We went with the mac "Less is more" approach. Anyways…..your comments please…..and remember V1.1.
