Sacina on Rails

It’s been a long six years; today marks the launch of the newest iteration of my personal site, Sacina. Rewritten entirely in Ruby on Rails, it’s faster, better looking, easier to use, and with more features.

When I started in on this newest version of Sacina, it got me reminescing. I thought of the “old” internet, when I was a child, of the early 1990’s. You may remember these sites, with such staples as unformatted text, ugly tables, dividing lines, and cheesy, tiled background patterns. My, how things have changed. Now there’s CSS, a plethora of languages to code in, and much, much nicer graphics.

You might wonder how we got here (if you didn’t, you can stop reading here – on top of educating those who are interested, this post is for me, as well).

The Beginning

Roll back to June of 2000. I tried my hand at a website to hold the various icon sets and Kaleidoscope schemes I’d made over the years. Not knowing the first bit of HTML, I settled for some free hosting, a template, and iDeal Mac was born. It wasn’t much, and the content wasn’t my best work, but it paved the way for future mac-themed sites.

In 2001 came my first real opportunity in the Macintosh community. Mac OS X had just been out a few months, and a few brave souls began hacking away to find a way to theme it. One such ground of people at the brave (but defunct) website MacCustomise did so, and XThemination was born.

One day, I emailed one of the staffers, Matt, to see if they needed some help. Before long, I was writing reviews and posting news to the site. Unfortunately, it was not to last, for about a year later the site closed down. All was not last, forever.

Nowhere Studios

Finding myself with much more free time, I set about creating a new personal site, iDeal Mac having gone the way of the Dodo. What came out of it was Nowhere Studios, a frame-laden site with some various OS 9/ OS X icons, desktop pictures, and some various other goodies from time to time (some of which are still available here in the ‘Goodies’ section, might I add!). My good friend Matt helped out from time to time, especially when my computer died and he in effect babysat the site for a few weeks.

Nowhere went through two redesigns itself before closing down.

XThemes 2.0 and Beyond!

Cheesy header aside, in late 2003, me and Matt got back together to relaunch XThemination. One of the first things we’d decided was that ‘XThemination’ was too long, and settled on XThemes instead.

We launched in January ‘04, but facing competition from the (arguably better) MacThemes, it was only a matter of time before it, too, came to an end.

Facing boredom oncemore, I went back to the drawing board, looking to resurrect Nowhere Studios. Realising I’d outgrown the name, Sacina came into existence. The first iteration was, in essence, a reskinning of Nowhere Studios with WordPress at its core.

Of course, I’m never happy with a project, always compelled to go back and make it better – and so when I inevitably did, I’d decided that WordPress had too many limitations (I’d hacked it quite a bit to work with the layout of the site), and ended up recoding the entire engine in Ruby on Rails – and I have to say, I’m impressed. Other than some ActionScript and a smattering of Java a few years ago, I’m not really a programmer.

That said, I’ve found Rails incredibly easy to use, and although it’s been by no means a walk in the park, figuring out how to do things is much more intuitive than any other language I’ve looked into. Those of you creative types that are looking into getting some coding experience, I heartily recommend starting with Rails.

Now, enough of that – sacina is back!

August 19, 2007 00:01   1703 Comments