There has been so much hype surrounding Ruby on Rails. Even the mailing list for my beloved CGI:Application framework was being littered with posts comparing the two or about how to make thinks more railsesque. But on the other hand, I had spent so much time coding my previous site engine in Perl and perfecting it that I didn’t know if it would be worth the effort to learn a new platform, a new language with a different set of idioms, and rewrite working code. Well in about two months (my first commit was April 6th), I have a working site that is nearly feature comparable (and in some cases far surpasses) with my previous design. Rails really is a very powerful web development platform.

I happened to be looking for a better way to show a preview of my web albums when I came across Prototype-UI which is a suite of user-interface components. Their carousel component was just want I need to spruce up my site design. The only problem was that documentation on the site is quite sparse and it took me a while to get things sorted out.