Zach Holman

Slashdot just had an article with a rather inflammatory post title: Thinking about Rails? Think again. The story was about Derek Sivers and his idea to rewrite PHP-driven CD Baby to Ruby on Rails. Two years later they've dropped Rails and moved back to PHP. He lists his reasons in his posting at O'Reilly.

Naturally, I like Rails a lot, and I've use CD Baby frequently, so I wanted to check out his reasoning. It wasn't very intellectually satisfying. It boiled down to "Rails doesn't work for our existing setup, so PHP rocks". As commenters on /. and the posting have mentioned, this was a clear cut case of not understanding the language or the framework before they jumped into things. If you're trying to maintain backwards compatibility, integration with other existing side apps written in another language, and don't want to move to a new server setup, here's a little hint: you might not want to move languages, regardless of which language it may be. Rewriting your entire system just for the sake of a rewrite or for perceived benefits that you haven't quantified is asking for trouble. Every time I rewrote Good-Tutorials (it's happened twice now) I had distinct goals in mind about what the new language might do for me, how to exploit new aspects of a framework or additional software I install, and so on. Derek might have had something like that in mind, but based on his posting it looks like he just wanted to jump into Rails for the sake of Rails.

Along those same lines... what is going on with cdbaby.com? I know they did a redesign a few weeks ago-- I wanted to include it in a blog post at some point but wanted to give them a chance to update their layout just in case. They tried positioning it as "intentionally bare" and "temporary", but that was a month ago. I'm a huge stickler for simplicity and an eye on usability, but there's a point where it's detrimental to your business. Their current layout looks like their stylesheet isn't getting loaded on the page. I can't see this as being anything but abysmal. You're a huge indy music company and you're likely trying to draw people away from buying mainstream albums from record companies. How can do establish that trust and get people to make that jump by having a site that looks like it was coded in an afternoon? It would be interesting to see what CD Baby's sales and conversion rates are compared to the month prior when it had at least some semblance of a design. Also interesting- those in the comments of that blog posting who seem to like the "design" say it increases usability. The big "but" here is that all of those people posting are regulars to the site- I would bet the response would be different if it were made by someone who's never been there before.