A couple weekends ago, I slammed out a new site, called dj search. The concept behind the site is obvious: find a dj for your upcoming event. We wanted the design and functionality to be “as simple as simple can be”.

Constructed with the help of a friend who is a professional dj, we cranked the site out in a weekend (plus a couple of part-time days of fine-tuning). The fact that we could design, code and deploy our app in less than 48 hours is testament to Rails’ power and efficiency.

I leaned heavily on some classic Ruby on Rails plugins to make this happen:

• Restful Authentication (with activation email option)…
• Paperclip (for photo uploads)…
• Will Paginate (for pagination)…

I also relied on a great blog post on styling Rails urls by August Lilleaas. This post helped me generate Google-friendly URL slugs quickly and easily. This was important, as the dj’s needed to be listed (and found) by name in the URL string. Such as:

www.dj-search.com/wombat

Or…

www.dj-search.com/joel

You know, Twitter-style URLs. Search engines love these slugs. How do I know? The answer is simple: In just a couple of weeks, we hit #1 on Yahoo for our primary search term and #6 on Google (1st page). Not a bad start.

As you can see, nothing too complex or involved. The basics. I did, however also add some tasty jQuery effects on the main page – a horizontal slider which serves up avatars of users (dj’s). I also added a “dj cloud” on the main page which is randomly populated from the database.

Check it out if you need a dj for your event.