Pull up the People Blog

Pull up the People officially launches this weekend and although it’s a pretty simple site at the moment, I’m proud that I’ve been able to actually get it looking the way it does. I had launched the site in a different iteration about a month ago, built in Wordpress. While this got it up and running, I felt it came off a bit cheesy.

The current version of the site was quite a learning experience. It’s built with Ruby on Rails, something I’ve been wanting to tinker with for a while (since it was originally introduced actually) but I never got around to it. I’ve actually heard that a lot from other developers I know. Sure Rails gets you up and running quickly, but it has it’s own set of conventions and syntax that takes some ramp up time. Often times it’s just easier to throw something together in Java, PHP, or whatever your more comfortable with, especially with the lack of current documentation since 2.0 was released. But after all is said and done, I’m really liking rails. I don’t think I could have gotten this site together as quickly as I did (a few weeks in my spare time) with any other language.

With the technical details out of the way. I my hope for this site is for it to be a channel to route money to social causes that benefit those less fortunate. As such, all revenues from affiliate links will be donated. In order for this to be effective it requires traffic, and lots of it. Step one is done (although there will be new features and refinements introduced along the way), now the REAL hard work begins,… getting the word out.

No matter how you ended up at this post, thanks your your interest and support.

-Gerlando.