New Rails Project breedmapper.com

Working on a new website, breedmapper.com.

It’s an app to help people select dog breeds. Basically, I was trying to find dog breeds that might be good for me (never owned a dog before) and found it really difficult to research different breeds, filter, etc. So I’m making an app for it to help myself and other people.

As part of my research, I asked reddit about what sites are best to use at: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogs/comments/ny5po/good_website_for_selecting_a_dog_breed/

They sent the following responses:

They all leave something to be desired when it comes to design.

After playing around with pet related domain names and seeing so many of them taken, I settled on breedmapper.com. I figure that might be a good name for a site that lists breeders (possibly puts them on a map?) and helps people select breeds. Based on the name though, there’s a natural bit of thought toward mapping the location of breeds in the sense of people uploading geotagged images of dogs and other pets and seeing them on a map.

Keeping with the original point of the site though, I need to make a list of dog breeds and start putting them into sortable categories.

So first, I need to find a list of dog breeds.

  • Google: list of dog breeds
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds
  • I like this list because it looks long and the content is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
  • http://www.justdogbreeds.com/dog-breeds.html
    • This is an interesting site because it shows up second on Google and has few ads relative to the other sites linked to on reddit. However, it’s still not good enough to be a go-to place for tech savvy dog owners, in my opinion.

    (Timestamp: 2:36 pm, Jan 2. First pint of beer – a coffee stout I got in bulk. Working from home in my pajama’s.)

    Now that I’ve found this list I need to scrape it and display it. Since my framework of choice is Ruby on Rails, that means creating a new Rails app (with RSpec instead of TestUnit) and start pulling data via nokogiri.

    Crap. I just switched back to OSX as my dev environment and need to configure emacs. So went to: http://batsov.com/articles/2011/10/09/getting-started-with-emacs-24/ Downloading emacs via homebrew is taking a while (even at a download speed of 460 kb/s), so using vim while it’s downloading. (Currently at 21%)

    (Timestamp: 2:54 pm, Jan 2. Just finished first pint of the day.)

    • Added rspec-rails and nokogiri to my Gemfile.
    • Created an open repository on github: https://github.com/ysiadf/breedmapper 
    • Ran into issues with my homebrew installation so downloaded and installed Sublime 2 Text Editor
    • Added capybara to Gemfile

    (Timestamp: 3:43 pm, Jan 2. No more beer, but ate a greek yogurt with blueberries.)

    • Added haml
    • Added test to see index goes to breeds#index
    • Added breed model

    (Timestamp: 5:03, Jan 2. Another beer. Some gummy fish. Lots of pistachios.)

    • Added ability to add breeds from Wikipedia.

    (Timestamp: 10:53 pm, Jan 2. Time for dinner.)

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