It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my website project, AniBroad. I think that it’s time for an update in a new series of post chronicling the progress of the project. Plus, everyone deserves an explaination after I added a note on front page on the site.

Last month, I updated AniBroad with this message of why no progress have been made in so long:

It’s been months since I’ve looked at this site directly, but I’ve been noticing a steady amount of traffic coming to the site. Thanks for checking it out! Though I’ve already stated this before that AniBroad is in beta phase: nearly a year later, it doesn’t look very good as it used to be, lol. ^^

With this message brings good news about the project! I have been working on a re-write of the website. Being originally written in PHP, it is now being re-developed in Ruby! The progress is slow as a turtle, due to real life commitments, of course… but thanks to my procrastination habits, I think the site relaunch will be better than I previously thought with planned features that was not possible in PHP!

The goal of AniBroad remains the same: providing Anime and Japanese culture bloggers a place to promote their content without “boundaries” of the sub-culture they represent, and a place for anime fans to discover new things in the culture to continue supporting the industry in these rough times.

While I normally post the precentage status of the project, I am going to keep my lips sealed… as it seems that when I mention precentages, it doesn’t increase, lol! However, I hope to have a working prototype in the mid-summer…ish. ^^;

To explain the note, first in a tl;dr fashion: PHP sucks! To explain the “PHP sucks!” part: I just wasn’t satisfied with the programming language.

I found it difficult to maintain the project with so many files I don’t have control over; a bad habit of many programmers, especially working on an app from scratch, and me being newb-ish. Plus, it wasn’t until much later that I found out about Git-ing, in case things went wrong. Being the adventurer that I am, I found out about Ruby on Rails, which is being used to rebuild AniBroad at this moment.

Riding the Rails of Ruby

Using RoR, I found many scripts, or in the case of Rails, plugins, with the features needed to make AniBroad possible. With PHP, it was hard to get what I wanted (features of which are under my own NDA until the next AniBroad Update), though there was the option of using a PHP framework to build the site much faster, but again, I just found PHP cumbersome to maintain with so much code. Yet, Ruby on Rails is basically a framework in itself, but the understanding of it is much easier than PHP.

In the note, I also said that I would no longer give out precentages on the project’s status. While L Ryuuzaki was good with precentages when judging his suspects, it doesn’t work very well for me with programming. To be honest: it took me longer to learn Rails, but understood it a lot faster than PHP after recovering from my mistakes in following the Rails Tutorial series. You could say that I have a working model of AniBroad right now, but there still some work to be done. And this only took 3 days time to implement, adding the fact that I have a hectic real life schedule, especially in the wild and crazy Summer.

Finding that I could do so much with a programming language, I’m proud to say that I’m addicted to writing AniBroad: a level of excitement toward the project that was not the same as a year ago. And learning about the RubyGems and Ruby Toolbox sites, I’m hitting my head on the desk from not finding out about this sooner.

That concludes this log entry on AniBroad. In the next update, I may have a screenshot or two, and possibly a (new) beta launch date!