About the Website

This website is written on a Ruby on Rails platform running on a Linux system. I highly recommend our setup to anyone out there considering designing their first moderately-complex website.

Here are our vital stats: (hopefully not giving away any state secrets)

All of our code is open-source. Please feel free to browse through the Subversion repository. I have already published a few Rails plugins that have come out of the development of this site. (See BrowserStatus and FilePermissions, for example.) Our GIS software is also freely available, in the same SVN repository. If you are interested in helping out, there are countless projects multiple developers could work on independently. Just let me know and I can set you up with permission to commit code changes.

The site was developed on my out-of-date Firefox browser, and it has been tested pretty thoroughly on Firefox versions 1 through 3, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7. We’ve been told it “looks great” on Safari, as well. It is highly recommended that you enable Javascript and cookies, although in untested principle you should lose no fundamental capabilities if you do not.

Having written websites both in straight HTML and using extensive Perl CGI, I would like to emphasize just how enormously Ruby on Rails helps streamline the development of all stages of a website. Please click on the icon below if you are interested in learning more.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

—Jason Hollinger, July 12, 2008