Monday, November 28, 2011

Random Video Game Name Generator with Ruby

I've been working with a LOT of Javascript lately. And when I say "working with," what I mean is "finding scripts that will do what I want them to do and modifying as necessary." Wait, isn't this supposed to be a Ruby on Rails blog? What happened!?

I got back to work on my random video game name generator tonight. I basically wanted to style it a bit and find a way so that it would generate a new phrase whenever the page is reloaded and then provide a link to reload the page. Pretty easy to do with a Javascript code, but I'm not a huge fan of reloading the entire thing just to reload this bit of text. Probably a better way to handle this, right? Maybe an Ajax call? What do you guys suggest? This works but I don't like the look of it, I guess.

Anyway, here's a link to the app on Heroku:

Random Video Game Name Generator

I wanted to accomplish a few things with this project. First off, build a random name generator with Ruby, and then figure out how you run that code on the web. This was largely a matter of learning Sinatra, and when I say "learning," I mean reading a tutorial and talking to @jqr about it for a few minutes. Sinatra is like SO easy.

I've got plans for how I could expand it (don't I always? Other coders have this problem too, right?) such as allowing users to save names they especially like, then enter a short description of what the game would be like. Viewers could also look at games that had been saved, perhaps vote on them, look at most popular games, etc, etc.

I think it's getting easier for me to think about WHAT applications COULD do, now that I know a bit more about HOW they're built. That makes sense, right?

5 comments:

  1. Simplest way to refresh the page using JavaScript.

    http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/javascript/page/reload.html

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  2. You should check out the jQuery Air tutorial (and Rails for Zombies) at codeschool.com. They are free and pretty damn good. By the way, where is the code for this? I don't see it on Github. Also, from viewing the source, you have a html document inside your html document.

    Keep up the good work! I may not always say it, but I'm always thinking it.

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  3. @Eli awesome, I'll take a look at that code tonight! Might be simpler than the javascript I'm using now.

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  4. @David Thanks for the encouragement! I definitely feel more productive when I'm blogging about coding on a regular basis, so I'm trying to keep that up, too.

    Looks like I haven't actually put the code on Git. I'll post it when I get home this evening.

    I've actually been planning to check into Rails for Zombies for a while now, so I'll take a look at both tutorials you mentioned (at some point)

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  5. Hey, nice work, bro. One thing: You could save the page for linking w/o a db by providing the title as page param. http://aan.heroku.com/?name=HugKnight_2_The_Cuddle_Struggle

    If you wanted the name to be more of a surprise, you could encrypt (look for a 2 way encryption gem) the name param as well .

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