This site is my project to learn how to code and to do SEO.
This site reviews payday loans and installment loans. It's aims to bring transparency to the payday loan and installment loan market which has traditionally been unregulated leaving it susceptible to predatory lending practices. Transparency helps borrows protect themselves through education and reduces pricing through efficient markets. The site provides detailed reviews on lenders, ranking tables, sorting tools, links to direct lenders, and an application to a loan matching service.
The site runs on one domain with a blog as a sub-directory. It uses Rails and Wordpress. The main websever is nginx. Wordpress is used for the blog and Rails is used for rankings and tools. nginx and Wordpress are hosted on EC2. Rails is hosted on Heroku. Wordpress uses a LAMP stack. Rails uses unicorn and postgresql.
Github stores the Rails code.
All styles, javascript, google tag manager, internal tracking are managed and coded once in Rails. Headers, navigation, and footer are also managed in Rails. All these components are called in from WordPress.
- blogbars_controller called by WP for sidebar sliders
- lenders_controller called by WP for individual lender reviews
- homes_controller has methods called by WP for styles, js, footer. It also has pixel tracking method that WP calls for internal tracking.
Visitors are tracked based on sessions and are saved once they click to a lender or enter the application.
- 1/11/2014 DB clean up deleted pages, sources, lenders (and associated joins) tables; deleted unused fields
- 12/31/2013 pages and sources tables no longer in use. URI now used
Applicants tracking table gets downloaded when I need to upload new database. Haven't figured out how to append information into one table and or setup for production versus analysis DB.
- 1/11/2014 downloaded applicants table. Heroku has clean start.
- 1/13/2014 cleaned up all schema. DB matches rails schema
- 1/17/2014 added visitor cookie
- 3/23/2014 Added primary key to payday and term loan state join tables
