About Narnach's Links

Short description

Narnach's Links is a simple bookmark collection website, which provides some social features like ratings and comments. Users can create a free account and start collecting bookmarks. You get your personal tag cloud, as well as a global tag cloud. For me, it has made it easier to find interesting articles and websites - because I have one place to remember them.

This site is also my personal playground to toy with new ideas and experiment with things. One day it might actually look pretty and be useful. Imagine that!

Design and name

I am by no means a graphical designer, which should be obvious from the website's layout. And I'm not creative with names, which should also be obvious from the fact that it still uses the name Narnach's Links, instead of something catchy.

History

Narnach's Links started as a simple project to toy around with Ruby on Rails on my Slicehost VPS, and to collect links on various topics I like. Over time it has grown to include a tag cloud, comments and digg-style ratings. It has also become my default victim whenever I want to try out new webservers or server-related tools.

Tech

Current Narnach's Links tech:

• Application server: Mongrel
• Automated deployment: Capistrano
• Automated tests: Ruby's test/unit
• DBMS: SQLite
• HTML Templates: ERb
• Operating System: Gentoo Linux
• ORM: ActiveRecord
• Source Code Manager: Subversion
• Web framework: Ruby on Rails
• Webserver: Nginx

Past Narnach's Links tech:

• Application server: Fastcgi
• DBMS: MySql
• Webserver: Apache, Lighttpd

Tech I know from other projects which might make their appearance on Narnach's Links

• Automated tests: RSpec
• Caching: Memcached
• HTML Templates: HAML
• ORM: DataMapper, Sequel
• Source Code Manager: Git
• Web framework: Merb

Narnach's Links and yoMedia

The experience gained here has paid off at my day job, which is being a developer for the Dutch company called yoMedia.biz (Dutch site). Our first large public project was the mobile media sharing/creation website yoFriends.com. The experience gained there and on Narnach's Links has helped me make a better and cleaner system design for our new project (to be announced), as well as to develop that code base test-driven (or actually behaviour driven).

   -Wes "Narnach" Oldenbeuving