Kopongo

I bundled the code from the previous post into a plugin, called Chartr. This makes it easy to create graphs within rails.

Here's how to use it.

First, install the plugin. (It's probably a good idea to install it with '-x' since it's likely to be updated. Also, I should mention that this is my first plugin.)

    ruby script/plugin install -x svn://syvera.com/plugins/chartr

Right, so now we need to graph something. You can put a graph into any page, but let's create a page that definitely deserves a graph:

    ruby script/generate controller graphs index

This gives you an index.html.erb page where you can put your graph. In that page, we're going to use Chartr to give us a random graph. This is the code:

    <%= Chartr.make_simple_line_chart Array.new(5) {|i| rand(10)}, 
                                      ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five'],
                                      'stuff to graph' %>

So that's going to give you a graph like this:

Sure, that's cool. But what the heck were those arguments?

The first one is for your values:

    Array.new(5) {|i| rand(10)}  # returns an array of 5 random values between 0 and 9

The second, also an array, is for the legend. No explanation needed for that. The last is for the html 'alt' tag.

You could provide a fourth one for the size of the graph. If not, the default is 200x100.

A friend wanted to set up a site for gigs going on in Cape Town. A site where regular folk could consult to figure out who was playing where on a given night, and where musicians or bars could list gigs and events.

I wrote zalist.co.za up to show him how it could be done in rails.

Ingredients: postgres, rails.

That site's at cotswold.co.za.

We wanted to create a guest house site with the text in various languages.

Since the people who were going to translate the site from english into [French|Italian|German] were going to be 'geographically distributed', and not likely available at the same time, I thought it would be too complex to coordinate all those translations and the updating of the site. Creating the site in rails as a CMS was the easiest way to deal with it. When someone is ready to add or translate text, they can login and do so.

Basic Ingredients: Rails and postgres, along with the globalize, file_column and exception_notification plugin.