» June 28th, 2009
How to learn more about Ruby on Rails
“Learning Rails has been an awesome way to learn about programming; using the ‘Rails’ framework and opinions helped me to learn best practices and object oriented programming concepts.”
How I did it: I bought Simply Rails 2 and coded the example digg like site, ’shovel’. Then got very excited about rails and bought the Agile Web Development with Rails book; and built the example store application. Since I’m a huge fan of twitter I built my own short URL site for tracking clicks on the links I post all around the web - rant.cc . Starting to feel confident, I build out a new site in the agile style called prayerlife.net the concepts are similar twitter and 43things. This time I was working without a tutorial but referencing the Agile book and searching the web and google group Ruby on Rails: Talk for help along the way. I also tune in to podcasts: Railscast, Rubyology, and Learning Rails. In addition, I participate in a local usergroup, OCRuby.com, where I can ask questions and learn from others in realtime. At a meeting I learned from a presentation on using the console while demonstating ‘Active Record’; this helped me to catch the key concepts of data models.
Lessons & tips: The best way to learn is to… just build it. Get in touch with others who are learning as well. Also, connect with those who have programming experience. The podcasts are are great way to get past concepts that seem difficult.
Resources: Podcast: Railscast, Rubyology, and Learning Rails
post a comment | tags: programming, ruby on rails
filed in: development
» May 6th, 2009
Crowd Notes (Twitter favorites) from An Event Apart 2009 Seattle
One thing I really enjoy about Twitter is the conversations that happen during an event. So, while attending An Event Apart this week, I took most of my notes on my iPhone. My powerbook is 7 years old, and I refused to take my PC to this event. Surprisingly, the iphone worked out great. At times the wireless was faulty; but the iPhone fell back on the edge network. I spent two days of tweeting while marking clever, funny and informative comments as favorites (generated by the crowd, on twitter.com). At the finish of the conference I ended up with 278 noteworthy entries [ twitter hashtag: #aea09 ]. I viewed the favorites on twitter and copied the ordered list (source) into an HTML presentation (S5) template by Eric Meyer. Check out the presentation at aea09.pixelhandler.com. Much of the conversation was centered around the topic of User Experience (UX).
Update (5/10/09) - I added an iPhone CSS stylesheet to the presentation to make it mobile friendly for Apple enthusiasts.
Check out my #aea09 conference notes, I used twitter’s favorite star to group think my note-taking. Then I copied the html and pasted into Eric Meyer’s S5 HTML presentation template.
Also, my pics and the AEA group pics on flickr.
post a comment | tags: html, iPhone, notes, presentation, twitter
filed in: Social
» May 5th, 2009
Field Notes From An Event Apart 2009 for Web Professionals - Day One
5/4/2009 
Jeffrey Zeldman on Redesign, session 1
Be a strategic design partner, or else you will not influence the design …do the research. —@Zeldman
post a comment | tags: conference, development, event, notes, user experience, Web Design, Web standards
filed in: Design
» April 25th, 2009
Alpha release of PrayerLife.NET, a social (prayer) Web site
I’m working on a new social prayer site at PrayerLife.NET feel free to visit, create an account and share/manage your prayers online.
PrayerLife.NET is social media web service, a tool for users to connect & prayer with others. Features: prayer and list sharing (pubic or private). This site is currently an alpha release, proof of concept. Visit the about page here.
I am looking for people to test the concept, who would like to use the internet to connect and pray for others.
post a comment | tags: internet, online, prayer, service, web application
filed in: Social