Well tonight I finished hacking together my first attempt at a Ruby on Rails-based application.

Basically what I built was a clone of the *wars (ala kittenwars) site where you put images head to head and allow the viewer to vote. Not to be shy about ripping off ideas, I also borrowed the CC-licenced theme for wordpress.

It’s called FlickrWars! and the twist is that it uses Flickr as the image store allowing me to change the photosets/tags/user photos on the fly. Could be interesting if it ever goes live but it is really just a simple proof of concept.

What it supports:
- voting
- viewing of last X photos
- list of top ranked photos
- list of bottom ranked photos
- most viewed photos

Images are currently randomly placed against each other. Could easily just grab photos from a particular tag. Already thinking about a tag interface where the user could add tags to the system and a new tag would be chosen every X minutes.

All in all the project satisfied my short-term goal of building something with RoR and briefly touching the Flickr API. I didn’t really have much exposure to Ruby previously but I’ll be digging into it more moving forward.

I’ll attach a couple of screenshots to this post. The code is pretty rough and I’ll be cleaning it up over the next few days. Perhaps when its a little more polished I’ll find somewhere to put it online.