12.3. The Status Feed

We come now to the pinnacle of our sample application: the status feed. Appropriately, this section contains some of the most advanced material in the entire tutorial. Making the status feed involves assembling an array of the microposts from the users being followed by the current user, along with the current user’s own microposts. To accomplish this feat, we will need some fairly advanced Rails, Ruby, and even SQL programming techniques.

Because of the heavy lifting ahead, it’s especially important to have a sense of where we’re going. A mockup of the final user status feed, which builds on the proto-feed from Section 11.3.3, appears in Figure 12.18.