Thanks to some hard design work on the part of Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma I was able to launch a new look for the website of singer/songwriter Sarah Masen a week or so ago. Sarah’s recently released three new EPs (her first releases since 2001, and all with hand made packaging) and it was high time the site got a new lease of life.

At heart, the site is a simple rails application, and we’re still making frequent updates as we let the new design settle in and begin to hook the site together with the new web world that has sprung up since it was last given any real attention. One of the latest changes is the use of the flickraw gem to pull in photos from gigs. We’re using last.fm’s machine tags to identify events, which may not be the best route as we build out the archive but for now provides a nice way to disambiguate events on flickr, with the fringe benefit that the photos show up on last.fm too.

Look out for more updates soon and give the EPs a listen!

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A couple of years ago I moved the discussion boards on Sarah Masen’s website over from a rather nasty tangle of PHP and HTML that I had chosen for its threading view, to the considerably more flexible Phorum. Phorum has been serving us well, but a number of regular posters have lately been reminding me that the move left our archives from the old software inaccessible.

I had always intended to put together a quick collection of scripts to allow access to those archives, possibly with some searching, but the prospect of getting it all together with the appropriate threading and the legacy database had put me off. That was before I read about Rails’ acts_as_tree option.

Using acts_as_tree and SearchGenerator, putting the app together required little more than a few commands to change some database field names, writing a few lines of glue code, and getting the templates together.

Loading up the threads (some of them quite lengthy) proved a slow process, but since the content is never likely to change, a few page caches and a little tweaking to the pagination links have the whole thing effectively becoming a big static site that I can change very rapidly.

You can find the end result at www.sarahmasen.com/oldboards/

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