SarahMasen.com

2000-present
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Apache, XHTML, CSS

Sarah Masen is a singer/songwriter based in Nashville, TN. Initially run as a fan-site I took over this site at Sarah's request shortly before the release of her 2001 album "The Dreamlife of Angels". The site provides the usual features of a musician website (album details, lyrics, MP3s, etc) together with a collection of articles written by Sarah and her author husband David Dark, and a thriving message board community that, in the years since Sarah last released an album, has taken on a life of its own.

The site was initially coded in PHP, using the Savant template system to separate application and presentation logic. Alongside careful use of CSS for layout, this allows for rapid redesigns of the site and efficient updates to its functionality. Use of CSS also allows for considerable reduction in filesize over the earlier iterations of the site, preserving bandwidth for the MP3 downloads.

In early 2006 I ported the site to Ruby on Rails, in order to make the codebase more maintainable and easily extensible. Apache's mod_rewrite functionality had been used extensively to allow for web page addresses that are not dependent on the technology behind them and that are clear to users, and that made the transition to the site's new structure very straightforward.

The message boards have become for many the focal point of the site. They are powered by the popular Phorum message-board software following an upgrade in mid-2004. Phorum has been customised with plugins to allow for Atom feeds of all boards and discussion threads, and to provide details of the most recent posts on the homepage so as to help users catch up. In general, the community behind the message boards is a courteous one and there is little need for moderation, but we monitor them carefully, a task aided by the atom feeds.

The site also features an email list that I maintain for Sarah. Though used irregularly at present, it is constantly growing and forms a crucial support base to help with future projects and releases.

Visit the site at: www.sarahmasen.com. You might like to also visit www.everydayapocalypse.org, the website of Sarah's husband David Dark that I also run.