Social Thing

Today we delved deeper into some of the details involved with routes and other portions of building rails projects. Today we were to build a certain Social Thing-a-jigger that would allow users to find friends, add them into friend circles, and then share those friends posts that have links associated with them. A post would be kind of like the Facebook posts. There are links added to them.

The first challenge is setting up the associations. We created a Circle Object that would link to a User through a join table. This way, someone can be both part of a friend circle and have their own friend circles. To me, this was the most challenging part of the entire project. It is an extensively difficult portion and not all that easy to at first comprehend and associations have never been my strongest point. But after that, we managed to get the rest of the project out relatively quickly and easily.

We created posts that would have links associated with them which means that they have to be created simultaneously. We created yet another join table that would associate a particular post to a person. So this way, someone can share a post with an entire circle and have that person access all the posts that have been sent their way. This went along relatively quickly as well as this is a rehash of much of what we have already learned. Moving on, we continued with creating posts that have associated Link items with them. These would have to be created simultaneously but thanks to a new thing we learned today we could accept an associated hash that would let us create that item right in the form.

While we did not manage to finish the final part of the project - which would have us then create a user, post, and link all at the same time, I feel that we had made great progress.

Things I think I think:

• The weather continues to baffle me. Freezing cold in the morn. Warm at the afternoon.

• Someone down below me on the train is watching the Finals game on an iPad. I hope that he is a Spurs fan. I am always a fan of seeing LeBron lose.

• Markets are down a lot today. Whatever happened to the SP500s 19 straight Tuesdays up? Sigh. My portfolio did beat the SP500 today, riding on the backs of some high yielding dividend large caps.

• Chased a rabbit today during my morning run for half a mile. It makes me wonder how smart these rabbits are.

• Installed the iOS 7 beta. It works fine so far though there are a few times when it goes all crazy with the battery drain. Usually I finish the day with 51% or so. Right now I am at 35%. But otherwise, I think it is exceptionally beautiful and though has its lagginess, is real good. I especially appreciate the cellular options, which help me minimize my cellular drain.