Hello World!

August 28, 2022

Hi everyone.  Welcome to my new website.  After a long fruitful career in quality assurance and food manufacturing, I've made a complete 180 and I'm focusing on growing Tim Jedrek full time.  I hope that through Tim Jedrek, I can work with businesses in the area and help them grow through building their websites and software.  

I really enjoyed redoing this website.  I made it from scratch using Ruby on Rails. A lot of different technologies and frameworks were used to make this which included:

  • Rails - Framework used to build the HTML and server side logic
  • Devise gem - add-on to build model for admin and users
  • PostgreSQL - SQL database to store data
  • Tailwind CSS - CSS framework used to customize layout
  • Sendgrid - API used to construct the mailers for the contact form
  • AlpineJS - Javascript framework to create interactivity in the mobile menus
  • Action Text / Trix Editor - add-on for the WYSIWYG editor
  • S3 - Uploaded images are stored in an AWS S3 bucket
  • Dokku - Used for deployment and configuring the linux server
  • Linode - Host for the website
  • Ubuntu - OS for the server running the website

What was really fun was making application helper FUNctions...  Inserting this function into the application_helper.rb file

 def random_title_text
      titles = [
        "Grow your online presence!",
        "Solutions to modernize your business!",
        "Get your business on the internet",
        "Custom web applications mobile friendly",
        "Create a web presence and increase sales volume"
      ]
      titles[rand(titles.size)]
end

and this into the application.html.erb file

<title>Tim Jedrek - <%= random_title_text %></title>

which calls the random_title_text function changes the title of the page at random.  I also used the same principle and made a custom form validator where a random idiom/phrase is presented and the correct word is required to send the form.

The site also features user authentication and when I'm logged in, I can easily add more pages and customize content.  Basically, creating a custom CMS that is suited to my needs.

Preview of the admin interface


You can see the git repository for it here:  https://github.com/timjedrek/timjedrek.com

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