19.10. Let’s Make a Blog!

For many people, the one thing that really “turned them on” to Ruby on Rails was the 20-minute demo given by Rails’s creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, in which he showed how to create a simple weblog. That demo was originally done using Rails 1 and has since been updated (and changed somewhat) for Rails 2 and Rails 3. You can watch the latest demos online at http://www.rubyonrails.com/screencasts/.

A blog is a great way to show how easy it is to create a fairly complex application using Rails. In the remainder of this chapter, I’ll explain how you can create a very simple blog application. I’ll use a feature called migrations, which will cut out a lot of the hard work of creating the database structure of the Model.