Using Ruby to Solve Problems

This past week I've been working through Learn Ruby the Hard Way. It's really a great resource (as I've mentioned a few times already) and I'm picking up lots of good habits. Here's a little example:

I work full-time doing SEO for an e-commerce site, and a while back we ran into a problem on our site with duplicate content. We needed a simple tool for entering two blocks of text and calculating how similar they were as a raw percentage. We eventually found some tools, but they weren't quite what we needed and weren't that great.

So I got the idea of building something using Ruby to do just this and spoke to my friend Eli about it. I still haven't actually BUILT this little program (and I'm sure it WOULD be little, at least at first) and part of the reason was that I didn't have a great idea of HOW to build it. I assumed I might have one model, say Text, with two textarea fields that could be compared, then spit out a percentage for similarity.

Obviously, I'd be using Ruby to make this calculation and that would be a matter of defining a word, counting instances of words, and then making a comparison between both blocks of text.

I've been doing a lot of work using Ruby to open and edit files, so it's obvious I could do similar operations to open and compare files, then generate a report based on that comparison. Not an elegant solution, since users would want to paste text into fields and compare them, not upload files to compare. But I'm sure it's doable. So that might be my next project.

I kind of tend to bounce around between projects, but I'm learning the entire time, so I don't feel bad about it. That's what these projects are for, right?

I also tend to think of an idea, and immediately think of ways to expand it even before I have the original idea working. For example, I'm already thinking of how this project could be expanded to do other things with text, such as identifying words that are used too frequently, identifying passive voice, identifying and suggesting replacements for adverbs and so on. In this case, I think it's because the original problem seemed to be "How can we identify content that's too similar in terms of SEO?" but I've begun thinking of it as "How can we write better content for the web?"

From my limited experience and understanding of web development, programming and computer science in general, it seems to be a matter of identifying a problem and then finding a solution. Am I far off the mark here?