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Dang it… that link was completely wrong.. http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/

I’ve been debating that very thing for a couple of weeks now: new design or new everything. Right now, I’m 60/40 in favor of new everything.

I have spent a little bit of time getting rid of a lot of garbage. But there’s plenty more to go. When I first built this site, for whatever reason, I wasn’t using RJS consistently. I had render_without_layout’s everywhere (and still do in spots). The CSS/markup isn’t structured properly, the views are too large, etc, etc. Basically, all the signs to do exactly what you’ve suggested: refactor. But in this case, it seems like too much work, when rebuilding a simpler version would be more gratifying and possibly quicker. Plus, I don’t think I’d catch everything right away, and while that’s perfectly OK, it would annoy me to constantly stumble across something else that needs fixed/modified.

The funny part about this is I’m acting like rebuilding this site is the golden solution, and I’d never have to worry about it again as long as it was done right. Well, I thought I built this site right the first time. And before that, I thought the PHP solution was wonderful. And before that, just having a layout that used CSS was exactly what I was looking for. It never ends, and I’m sure this round would be no different in a couple of months. But that’s why I wake up everyday: to rebuild my site over and over and over :-)

Just an FYI – this site is much improved over simplebeta.com, so it’s clear that you are improving your skills :^)

It just takes time for us normal folk—Chris seems to pick up on things really, really fast. Way faster than I can. Often I’ll read something he posted, and not realize what he was talking about for another 2 months. But it’s fun nonetheless.

About those cookies, Rails really does make it easy. Whenever you save a new comment, that’s when you set the cookie. Something like this:

def save_comment
  @comment = Comment.new(params[:comment])
  # ...
  if @comment.save
    cookies[:name] = {:value => [@comment.name],
                      :expires => 1.week.from_now}
  end
end

You can call it whatever you want, you could say cookies[:neolyn] if you felt so inclined. Then, to use the cookie (you could put this in the action that loads a single post, the one with the comment form—you might call it permalink?):

def permalink
  # get the post based on the year, month, day,
  # and permalink params
  # ...
  @comment = Comment.new
  @comment.name ||= cookies[:name]
end

That should fill in the “name” field if there is a cookie. And of course, you’d have to do that for each field you wanted a cookie for (name, email, site).

And I could be wrong about this one (I don’t think I’ve ever tried it), but you may be able to store all the values into one cookie, though I don’t know the benefit.

cookies[:neolyn] = {:value => [@comment.name,
                               @comment.email,
                               @comment.site],
                    :expires => 2.months.from_now}

Then maybe access it like:

@comment         = Comment.new
@comment.name  ||= cookies[:neolyn][0]
@comment.email ||= cookies[:neolyn][1]
@comment.site  ||= cookies[:neolyn][2]

Anyway, like I said, I don’t know why you would do it that way, but I think you can.

Hmm, I wonder if this works…

# loading defaults from cookies
@comment = Comment.new(cookies[:comment])

# storing cookies (after creating a comment)
%w{:name :email :site}.each do |c| 
  cookies[c] = @comment.send(c) 
end

Untested, but worth a try ;-p