README

Source code for my professional blog, built using Ruby on Rails

Licence: MIT

Feel free to use this code as you see fit.

Stack

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• Esbuild
• Stimulus + Turbo

Features

• Permissions: I've deliberately opted for a fairly lightweight permissions system given the requirements of this app. Built using cancancan. To customise, see app/models/ability.rb.
• Authentication: Built using devise. Currently uses out of the box config. I may look at expanding upon this in the future.
• ViewComponents: Uses ViewComponents to create reusable components. Extended so that the it expects to find a partial in app/views/** instead of app/components/**.
• NewsLetter: Not fully implemented, but the backend is there. I'll look at expanding upon this in the future.

UI Features

• Built using TurboFrames to create a seamless user experience (very few full page refreshes are required). Given time I'll like to expand upon this to create a more dynamic experience (e.g. more use of Stimulus).
• Dark Mode: Includes a dark mode, along with the ability to customise the colour scheme using the profile page. You can select either system, light or dark mode.
• Create Articles: Users can create articles, and upload images. Images are stored using ActiveStorage.
• Comments: Users can comment on articles.
• Notifications: Users are notified when someone comments on their article.
• Avatar: Users can upload an avatar. This is stored using ActiveStorage.
• Responsive: The site is responsive, and works well on mobile devices. Note: I plan on doing a pass to improve the styling across the site.

Preview

Future Work

• Improve the styling across the site. It looks okay but it could be better.
• Cleanup the codebase. There are a few areas that could be refactored. The current state definitely isn't 'polished'.
• Add testing. Should have done this from the start.
• Finish the newsletter feature.
• Publish the site using AWS. I'll probably use Kamal and AWS since I don't really care about load balancing my dev blog. Replace the images here with a link to the live site.
• Possibly add more features but I'd prefer to keep this site fairly lightweight and aim for improving the polish instead.