Deep within the myriad web tutorials, eBooks, and tinkering/spelunking of others' projects on and with Ruby and Rails that I've penetrated with my curiosity comes an official announcement: I've embarked on my first, really real Ruby on Rails project.

Check out the following link. Although you can't necessarily tell, this site is not built on a framework. It uses PHP for some light dynamic content, but there's no databases or tables. The newsfeed is just one long HTML file, for Petra's sake! The closest it comes to reusable coding practice is having a bunch of include files. Also, there is nary a touch of HTML5 or CSS3 modern goodness to see. Convention over configuration? DRY? Nope, son. The site as it stands is old-school web development.

I aim to change that.

That brings us to PYC on Rails, which will be a Rails 3 web app with a database and models and controllers and drop shadows that aren't brought to you in image form. It's gonna be all versioned nicely in Git and deployed using Capistrano. It's gonna use Rubygems. It's gonna be available on Github once it's public so anyone can see how it was made and pick it apart.

Obviously, it's not gonna be perfect, because it's my first site and I'm bound to do stupid beginner things. However, when it's done, it's gonna be a great jumping off point from the, uh, zeroth site I, um, do(n't?) have. Confidence++ when it's done, which will hopefully lead to doing some awesome stuff on Morethingsneed.to once I've got a better idea how RoR works.

Web development in my free time? I'm back.