BLAH! What a nightmare![](

Now that I'm working at a rails shop, I've had some pretty major pressure to learn rails. That means this site gets to head back the other direction. The setup has been a pain in the neck but at least I'm learning the language this time instead of just struggling through crappy tutorials and documentation.

Plus, now that I know a lot more about the language, I can build stuff a lot more easily. It's invisible to the real world but this site is now using a real login structure unlike what the old Java site was using. That means, in the future, I can actually build this site to spit information over to Facebook or Twitter instead of just all being stuck on this page.

And, this site is now HTML5) Well, the doctype is at least. And it’s using jQuery! … Well, it will be once I get my butt in gear to do some fun stuff with it.

On that note, the company I work for now is actually a web based game company… That means I am actually getting experience building out some pretty complex javascript on a daily basis. While I can’t link to any of that work from here, this site is now able to be a testing grounds for a lot more ideas then just site layouts (which my sites have always seemed to be in the past)

And, now that I have a real web framework to play with, I can do things like spit out these posts in JSON without having to load a bunch of shitty Java/Stripes code to hack the output into sanity. What a nightmare that was!

ALSO, since this site is now actually useable (I can POST again, god damnit![]() I can get back to actually USEING the site instead of just having it here as a placeholder while I tried to get up the motivation to get this place working in Java

So, there you have it) ZenPirate.com is back on line! Still, no one reads this so who cares. Soon, I’ll start posting some of the ruby hangups I ran into and try to actually participate in the field I’m a professional in like the rest of the world.