Building Web Apps

BuildingWebApps now on the latest Webvanta platform

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:40:01 GMT

We've just completed a rebuild of BuildingWebApps to move it to the latest Webvanta platform. It is now just another Webvanta site — which means that everything you see here you could build yourself, without any programming.

From your perspective, there should be virtually no difference, but it's a big deal for us. BuildingWebApps is the very first site that we built, as the company that was originally called Collective Knowledge Works and evolved into Webvanta.

Originally, we built a full-custom Rails application. Then it evolved into a multitenant application that could host multiple information portal sites. And then it evolved into a general-purpose content mangement system that can built information portals and just about anything else.

As Webvanta evolved, there was a lot of legacy code that was needed just for the old BuildingWebApps site, which was built before many of the general-purpose mechanisms that are now part of Webvanta existed. With the recent release of Webvanta 2.0, we've purged all that old, special-purpose code, and entirely rebuilt BuildingWebApps within the current Webvanta environment. (Thanks to Matt Meyers who did the majority of the work.)

Another piece of this was moving this blog, which until now ran on Mephisto, a separate Rails application. Now that Webvanta has a full-featured blog, we were able to move the blog into the main site.

In the process, there have been some broken links, broken feeds, and missing images. We think we have those all fixed up now, but if you spot any problems, please let us know.

LearningRails Sample App Update

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:50:32 GMT

Rails marches on, and the LearningRails screencast sample app was getting a little creaky. Sorry for that!

I’ve updated the application on github so that you can run the tests and the application itself using the current Rails as of this writing (2.3.2).

In the future, I’m looking at providing alternate versions of the intermediate steps of the application that are built and are compatible with Rails 2.3.x.

I’ll announce any updates here in this Blog as well as twitter: @chaupt

Second Webvanta Site Launched

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:52:23 GMT

When we first built BuildingWebApps.com, it was a dedicated application. As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve since rewritten it as a multi-tenant application, in support of our new business, Webvanta.

We’re pleased to announce that the second site on the platform is now live: Spartina.com is a “knowledge base for entrepreneurs ready to turn their ideas into great Internet businesses.”

You’ll see some visual design similarities to BuildingWebApps, which are not due to any platform constraints but simply to the fact that the same designer created both designs and reused some elements for efficiency. The Webvanta platform enables each site to be completely re-skinned.

If you’re interested in creating your own knowledge base site on any topic, please send us a message and we’ll get in touch.

Webvanta's Coming Out Party

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:54:01 GMT

It’s been awfully quiet here on the blog, and as is often the case, that doesn’t mean we’ve been slacking—quite the contrary, we’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone.

Since our last post here, we’ve been busy:

We’ve renamed our company to Webvanta Inc. (formerly Collective Knowledge Works, Inc.).
We’ve refocused our business plan for the hosted web service we’re building to serve web designers, rather than small businesses. You can read the teaser at webvanta.com
We’ve just launched the second information portal built on our platform, Spartina.com. It’s an information resource for entrepreneurs building Internet-based businesses, which we’ve built for David Hehman, a Webvanta investor and board member.
We’ve been doing the rounds of Angel investor groups, as we put together our first serious financing round.
While doing all that, we’ve managed to get out a couple more screencasts, including one on Deployment just released.

And, today we’re having our coming-out party, of sorts, at TechCrunch 50. We’re not one of the 50 companies that will be on stage, but we’ll be showing our stuff in the DemoPit.

If you’re a web designer who is intrigued by the idea of a more powerful, easier-to-use platform for building and deploying sophisticated web sites with no programming, head on over to Webvanta.com and sign up for our beta invitation list. We’re still in alpha testing now, but we plan to gradually open up to beta testers in the next two months.

New and Improved, Even If It Looks the Same

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:55:25 GMT

Yesterday was a big day here at BuildingWebApps/Collective Knowledge Works.

We have transitioned to a new code base, in which nearly all of the code underlying the site has been rewritten. Initially, the site should look exactly the same, and have all the same features, so in one sense this was a great deal of work whose goal was to have no visible change.

We had a few rough spots yesterday, but things seem to be in pretty good shape now, so please let us know if you encounter any problems.

So why did we do this? The big change is that our application is now a multi-tenant system, capable of hosting multiple sites within the same application. And in the process, we’ve cleaned up the system architecture and made it far more extensible.

We’ll be talking more about what we’re doing with this in the fall, but suffice it to say that anyone will be able to build a site like BuildingWebApps on our platform.

Now that we’ve made it through this big transition, we’ll get back to adding features, and you’ll see some results of that effort before too long.

At the same time, we’ve switched to Engine Yard as our host. The site is now running on two load-balanced slices, giving us greater redundancy and scalability, as well as the superb hands-on support from the Engine Yard team. Engine Yard is graciously providing us with these slices as the premier sponsor of the Learning Rails online course.

Kudos to our CTO Christopher Haupt and a small cadre of contractors (with Phil Misiowiec making the largest contribution) for pulling this off. (I wrote a large part of the original application, but I’m now primarily the business guy and am leaving most of the coding to the pros.)

Startup Camp and Foo Camp

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:56:45 GMT

I had a great time at Startup Camp and Foo Camp. It’s quite an amazing collection of folks that O’Reilly brings together.

I’ve posted an article with a few pictures and other tidbits.

Testing Rails Screencasts

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:59:05 GMT

After 10 lessons in which we built a simple Rails application without stopping to worry about testing, we’re redeeming ourselves by stepping back to fix up the tests and explain how to write new ones. The lesson was too long for one screencast, so we’ve posted it in two parts:

Keeping Up with the Information Flood

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:00:29 GMT

The web is such a wonderful facilitator of publishing and communication that it’s almost impossible not to be chronically overwhelmed by the amount of information available.

I’ve been working on my information diet for years, having dropped most print newspapers a few years ago, then cut out most magazines, and more recently having worked toward an effective approach for dealing with the incredible amount of information available via RSS feeds.

Even if I were to focus my interest solely on startups, Ruby on Rails, marketing, writing, or photography, there’s far more content produced every day than I can hope to (or want to) read. Striking the right balance between reading enough to stay informed and find things of interest, but not so much that it takes too much time or feels burdensome, is a real challenge.

I’ve just posted an article on my evolving feed-reading habits over on my personal blog.

What’s your strategy?

Startup Camp Here We Come

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:01:48 GMT

We’re thrilled to have been selected as one of the seven companies to participate in Startup Camp. This promises to be a fantastic opportunity to learn from a lot of great folks.

If you’re wondering just what it is we’re up to, take a look at our About Us. As you’ll see, it’s somewhat divergent from the BuildingWebApps site, but built from the same technology base. We’ll have more to say in the coming months.

Slides from Podcaster/Screencaster Talk

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:03:11 GMT

Michael and I are at RailsConf this week and joined a panel with our podcasting and screencasting colleagues in the Rails community. See our combined slides for some great tidbits and behind-the-scenes information.

| View | Upload your own

RailsConf 2008 Book Signing

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:04:29 GMT

Mike Clark, primary author of the new Pragmatic Programmers book Advanced Rails Recipes, will be holding a book signing meet-and-greet at RailsConf 2008 in Portland OR, this Friday. It will be at the Powell’s Books booth during the 12:30 lunch break.

Both Michael and I contributed recipes to the book and one or both of us plan on being at the signing for a little while. Come on by if you are at the conference and say hello!

Podcasting and Screencasting in Rails Panel

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:05:39 GMT

Besides the birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meetup at RailsConf 2008 that Michael recently blogged about, we will now also be doing a panel about podcasting and screencasting with our podcasting colleagues: Geoffrey Grosenbach of the Ruby on Rails podcast, Ryan Bates of Railscasts, and Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy.

This talk will be at 4:25pm on Friday, May 30th. We’ll be talking about the nuts and bolts of podcasting and screencasting and getting things warmed up for the BOF general discussion. Come join us if you are in Portland for RailsConf 2008!

Podcast Meetup at RailsConf

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:07:00 GMT

Together with Geoffrey Grosenbach of the Ruby on Rails podcast, Ryan Bates of Railscasts, and Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy, we’re organizing a meetup at RailsConf to talk about the future of podcasting and screencasting for Rails developers.

If you’ve been listening to our Learning Rails course or any of the other Rails podcasts or screencasts, this is your chance to make it a two-way conversation and help guide future efforts.

We’ve proposed this as a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session for 9 pm Friday night. The conference organizers won’t make their BOF selections until the 26th, so for now the location of the session is unknown. Check back here for updates.

Update: We’re on the schedule! Rooms D135 and 136, 9-10 pm Friday. See listing on the conference site for details.

I hope to have a chance to meet a bunch of our readers and listeners there.

Got Git? Rails, Plugins, and Submodules Not a Go Go

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:09:09 GMT

Sorry, it was a really long night, so I’m a bit Ga Ga. This is a summary of some of the challenges we’ve had with our Git migration and attempting to use submodules for vendor/rails and various plugins. We’ve run in to problems switching and merge between branches with and without submodules. Once I work this all out, I’ll write up a “real” article for BuildingWebApps.com.

For our current project, we’ve made the migration over to the Git distributed version control system. I’ve been using Git for tracking 3rd party open source projects, as well as using Mercurial. I’m still learning the ropes. Git’s support for branching was the main selling point for us. We’ve been using Subversion for a long time with great success, but the biggest weakness has been how much a pain it is to have multiple branches and deal with multi-way merges. While switching to Git requires a bit of a learning curve, it isn’t too bad.

Git makes working with multiple branches a relative breeze. Last week, I decided to give the submodule feature a try for tracking Ruby on Rails (vendor/rails) Edge, as well as a to migrate various plugins over. We used Piston in Subversion to good effect, and submodules seemed adequate as a replacement. There are numerous articles about setting up submodules, a couple of good ones are here and here.

Our scenario may or may not be that unique. We have a master branch (and other working branches) that represent our “version 1” code tree. We are doing a large refactoring in a set of branches for “version 2”. The two lines are running in parallel, and we occasionally merge/rebase from version 1 over to version 2. Version 1 is frozen around Rails 2.0.2. Version 2 is tracking Edge. I’ve set up version 2 to use submodules for vendor/rails as well as a number of our plugins. We are using Git 1.5.5.x at the moment.

The problem appears to be when you swap between branches of version 1 and version 2 (those without submodule and those with, respectively). There may be other problems, but we are tracking this down (interestingly, I have seen different results between Git 1.5.4 and 1.5.5, bugs?).

Starting with a clean clone of the remote repository (we are using GitHub quite happily), all starts out good. The master branch is clean and version 1 looks good.

I then switch to version 2 with a git checkout --track -b version2 origin/version2. Remember that version 2 is using submodules for vendor/rails and some plugins (e.g. rspec, rspec-rails, acts_as_versioned, etc.). I see delete messages for vendor/rails and the submoduled plugins. Interestingly, if I then do a git status, I see two entries (one for vendor/rails, another for one plugin—acts_as_versioned in this example). I don’t see the other plugins. The correlation here appears to be that the delete status only exists for those plugins that exist currently on the master (version 1) branch.

If I do git submodule init next, I see entries for all of my submodules being “registered”. If I then immediately do a git submodule update, I see the standard updating/downloading type messages and get the correct versions. Now if I git status, all on the version2 branch appears “clean”.

At this point, if I want to switch back to master (version1 branch), things go a bit crazy. If the immediate next command is git checkout master, I get the dread “error: Untracked working tree file ‘vendor/plugins/acts_as_versioned/CHANGELOG’ would be overwritten by merge” error (where the file may be different). Again, this appears to be in a directory where in the version 2 branch it is a submodule, but in the version 1 branch it is not.

Now I’m stuck. Various combinations of git clean don’t seem to help. git status insists the working directory is clean.

So, how do I go back?

If I git checkout master -f, I can switch. But, and a big but, the plugins that aren’t supposed to be in this branch and a variety of files from vendor/rails appear when doing a git status. If I clean those with git clean, I get a whacked directory tree.

Pending figuring this out, I’m switching back to the static inclusion of files in the vendor area and tracking them by hand. I’ll document a solution when found (or if anyone can set me straight or send pointers).

Good Works in Rails

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:10:41 GMT

Among the vast diversity of applications written in Rails, you’ll find many that meet personal or business needs. A few go for higher goals, addressing the needs of less fortunate people worldwide.

Here’s a couple examples that I encourage you to explore, and donate or loan some money:

BringLight, founded by ex-Adobe execs Melissa Dyrdahl and Drew McManus, allows you to donate to a specific project, so you know exactly where your money is going. You can search by the type of project or by location.

MicroPlace is a micro-lending site, operated by eBay (its first Rails application). Make a small loan to an entrepreneur on the other side of the world.

These are striking examples of how we can use the power of web applications to connect people that otherwise would be isolated and spread some of our high-tech affluence to other communities.

Page Hierarchy Screencast Posted

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:11:36 GMT

We’ve just posted our seventh screencast, the 15th lesson in the Learning Rails series. In this screencast, we add the concept of subpages, so we can have pages that don’t appear in the main navigation but instead show up as second-level navigation links on their parent page. To do so, we use a self-referential has_many association.

There’s lots more than can be done to continue refining our little content management system, but it’s rapidly approaching a useful level for small sites. We’ll wrap up some loose ends in the next screencast, and then move on in future screencasts to take care of the Contact Us and Resources pages. Then we plan to circle back and fix up the tests.

We’re thrilled to see that several thousand people are following the screencasts, and that the comments we’ve received have been overwhelmingly positive. If you’d like to help spread the word, pick up our Learning Rails ad and include it on your blog.

Tips for Bloggers

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:23:14 GMT

When we add blog articles to our database, we like to identify the author to give credit where credit is due. We also need to be sure that posts that we find through Google searches are still relevant.

It’s amazing how often it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to find the full name of the author, and how frequently posts are undated.

So here’s two suggestions for technology bloggers:

Make sure each post is dated. Especially if you’re writing about a fast-moving framework like Rails, knowing when a post was written is essential.
Include your full name somewhere! Nicknames are fine, but if you care about credit for your work, put your full name in the footer, or at least include an “About Me” link that provides your full name. Unless, of course, you don’t want anyone to know who you are…

Fourth Screencast Posted

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:22:32 GMT

The fourth screencast in the Learning Rails series is now available. In this lesson, we fill in the missing pieces of the user management system that the restful_authentication plugin doesn’t provide, such as the ability to list, edit, and delete users.

We’ve been getting great feedback on the screencasts, and we now have more than 3,000 people receiving the lessons via RSS or email. More than 20,000 lessons (audio podcasts + screencasts) were downloaded in the last 30 days.

If you haven’t yet signed up, you can sign up to receive the lessons from the start, or skip the eight audio podcasts that cover the basic concepts and start with the screencasts. We’ll send you an email every three days with a link to the next lesson.

Second Learning Rails Screencast Posted

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:21:52 GMT

We’ve just posted the second screencast in our free online course in Ruby on Rails. I think it came out pretty well—but what counts is what you think! Please leave a comment here or on the Lesson Page if you get a chance to watch it.

We continue to evolve our tool setup and fight with our Macs. This time we could not get screen sharing through iChat to work reliably, so we gave Adobe’s Acrobat Connect a try. It worked flawlessly.

We’ve had problems on both Christopher’s Mac and on mine with horrible distortion spontaneously showing up in the audio track, and we ended up recording the audio multiple times and trying all sorts of different setups. For my side, I ended up just recording it on a stand-alone Zoom H2, which worked well once I got the hang of its somewhat clumsy interface.

We’ve added a couple of small software utilities to help out with the video recording process:

The freeware Think utility provides an alternative app switcher that blacks out all the apps except for the foreground one, which helps minimize distractions.
Artis software’s shareware Small Screen puts a box on the screen of whatever dimensions you specify, which stays on top of other applications. This makes it easy to set up the various apps to be appropriately sized for the screencast dimensions. We’ll probably spring for the $26.95 for xScope, which combines this tool with lots of other useful screen utilities.

We’re putting the screencast files on S3, which delivers higher bandwidth than our regular host so your downloads should be quick. For working with S3, I’ve been using the free S3 Browser, which is a simple open-source app that provides a GUI interface to the S3 storage buckets. I’ve started using Bucket Explorer, which costs $29.99 (after a 30-day free trial) but is considerably more capable.

On to Lesson 11…

MacBook Pro Frustrations

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:21:10 GMT

As I described in an earlier post, in January I made the move from Windows back to the Mac. And, as described in another post, Windows has some serious issues as a Ruby development platform.

The MacBook Pro is physically a well-designed machine. There are lots of benefits to having Unix just below the skin. And a lot of things on the Mac work very well.

That said, I’m incredibly frustrated with the MacBook Pro and with Apple support, and at this point I simply could not recommend it. Other models and other usage patterns are apparently much more robust, but after a short period as a convert I’ve come to feel that the machine and the company are just untrustworthy.

There are three problems that have eviscerated any potential productivity gains for me:

The machine occasionally, randomly, decides that it won’t acknowledge any external display resolution other than 1440×900. The problem persists until I reinstall the OS.
It does not reliably go to sleep or come out of sleep.
When recording audio via the USB interface, it frequently adds horrible noise to the signal.

These are not problems specific to my machine. Searching the Apple forums finds many other people with the same problems and a very high level of frustration.

Christopher has a completely different audio setup and is seeing the same audio problems. It doesn’t matter what audio hardware or recording software you use. USB audio recording is simply unreliable.

I’ve spent hours on the phone with Apple support. Most of it has been with “Tier 2” support, and there’s no place to go after that. Their solution to the display problem is to reinstall the OS, something that I thought was a Windows-specific disease. Surely there’s just one or two files that are getting corrupted, which would be easy to restore, but no one seems to know which ones (and they aren’t the obvious ones).

The support staff, while friendly and generally knowledgeable, was completely unaware of the display problem, despite widespread reports on the forum. After weeks of back and forth with three different support people, I finally got a message that engineering is aware of the problem, and that at this point they have no fix. But since I’ve had the machine more than 30 days, they won’t take it back. And since it isn’t a hardware problem, there’s no point in sending it in for repair. Summary: I’m stuck with a defective, two-month-old, $3000 machine, that I can’t trust to hook up to a projector for a presentation.

This week Apple released a firmware update for MacBook Pros, and some people on the forum reported that it solved their display and sleep/wake problems. But for some people it does not. And it won’t install on my machine; it says my machine “doesn’t need it”.

Apple support never responds to my follow-up emails. They don’t specify what the updates are supposed to fix. They don’t acknowledge (and seem genuinely ignorant of) problems that are widely reported. They don’t respond to anything in the forums.

I hope that eventually there’s software updates that fix these bugs, and I’ll probably stick with the Mac because of the Unix underpinnings and the investment I’ve made. But at this point it is definitely a love/hate relationship, with a strong dose of hate, in which I feel trapped. And I’m completely fed up with the poor quality of Apple’s driver software and the company’s approach to supporting it.

Update 4/29/08: Last week, Apple finally released a firmware update that would apply to to my MacBook Pro. So far, the display recognition problem seems to have been fixed, but only time will tell if this issue recurs.

As for the USB audio problem, Chris and I have both simply abandoned USB audio after losing far too much time suffering with Apple’s bugs. I dumped my USB mic and got a mic with an analog output, and an M-Audio Firewire interface, and so far that’s working well. Chris already had a mic with an analog output, and his mixer provides an analog output, so he’s using the analog input of his MacBook Pro.

First LearningRails Screencast Posted

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:20:33 GMT

If you are a subscriber to our free online course or a regular listener to our LearningRails podcast (via iTunes or another RSS feed), we just posted Episode 9 (now also called Lesson 9). This is our first crack at capturing visually the complete walk-through of building a Ruby on Rails application. We’ll be taking it slowly, and iteratively, to try to explain all of the basics for beginners.

From a production point of view, we are still working on our technique. Unlike the podcasts, where Michael and I would record our parts separately and then edit them together, we wanted to make the screencasts a bit more “live” and conversational. Given that we live in cities a couple of hours apart, we are experimenting with tools to find the right combination for our needs.

Currently, we are using two Macintoshes (running Mac OS X 10.5) and using the new screensharing ability built in to Leopard. Michael has our slides prepared in Preview, has Macromates’ TextMate sized for our window, and iTerm.

We use Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X to capture Michael’s screen and narration while I watch via the screen share. We originally tried to capture my ‘shared’ voice (which Snapz can do), but the quality wasn’t that great given our bandwidth.

On my side, I originally recorded my voice using a copy of BIAS’ Peak LE 5, but the quality was flaky on my machine. I’ve used it before without problems, so this was troubling. I ended up capturing a good take with Garageband.

During the whole session, we were also monitoring each other over the phone.

With the raw materials, I edited things together, giving Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac a try. I have used Premiere for years on Windows, and was happy that it came back to the Mac. My experience, however, was just so-so this time. I had some troubles with importing the source materials and then getting things tweaked. Even got a hang one time. Sorry for the slight “slow motion” effect in this first episode. We can work around that next time by capturing our source material with slightly different settings. I’m also going to look in to trying Final Cut Studio once I save my pennies for it.

We look forward to your comments about the content or the production in general.

April Seminar Canceled

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:19:50 GMT

We’re sorry to announce that we will not be presenting our Learning Rails seminar on April 29-30, as originally planned. There’s a variety of factors that led to the difficult decision to cancel it, led by the fact that we had a relatively small number of registrations to date.

So we’ve decided to focus our Rails training, for now, on our free online Ruby on Rails course. We have published 8 audio podcasts so far, and in just a couple days we’ll begin releasing screencasts in which we’ll build a simple Ruby on Rails application, step by step. Although the RSS feed is still available, we’re asking people to sign up for the email list to receive announcements of lessons as they are published. If you want to receive mailings for the screencasts only, sign up here.

It’s possible that we’ll offer an in-person seminar in the fall, but we’re not going to make that decision until sometime this summer.

Windows As A Ruby Platform

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:19:09 GMT

Having switched from Windows to Mac a couple months ago, I was interested to see the long series of comments on this post by Peter Cooper on the Ruby Inside blog—Is Windows a First-Class Platform for Ruby. The predominant answer, from many developers with substantial experience, seems to be “no, but it should be.”

My take-aways from this (and from my own experience):

If you’re a serious Ruby developer today, life is easier if you can avoid Windows
It’s hard for the Ruby community to keep everything working smoothly on Windows, because most of the senior developers don’t use it
Like it or not, the majority of the world is on Windows, and for Ruby to achieve the degree of adoption it deserves will require more work on the Windows side

Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, April 18-19

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:18:32 GMT

The SD Forum has opened registration for the third annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, to be held April 18-19 in San Jose. While this is a Ruby conference, not specifically a Rails conference, many of the talks are Rails-related.

Christopher and I have been helping out on the program committee, and we’re excited about the list of speakers that the group has assembled. It is likely to be the largest Ruby gathering of the year in the San Francisco/San Jose area.

The speakers range from startups and leading consulting firms to giants Microsoft, IBM, and Sun:

Tim Bray, Sun: The Rubies in Context
Alex Le, Friends for Sale
Parker Thompson, Pivotal Labs: DRYing Up Application Development: Components That Don’t Suck
Jon Lam, Microsoft: The Borg discovers Ruby and Open Source
James Lindenbaum, Heroku: Cluster Management with rush, the Remote Ruby Shell
Tom Mornini, Engine Yard
Anant Jhingran, IBM
Jason Hoffman, Joyent
Joel Dudley, Stanford University: Ruby at the Edge of Biology and Medicine in the Genomic Era
Ryan Garver, ELC: Ruby features for Open Social Networking
Blaine Cook, Twitter

The topics span from developments in Ruby interpreters to deploying high-traffic Rails applications. As at any Ruby or Rails conference, many of the speakers are from small companies, but the addition of IBM and Microsoft is worthy of note—clearly Ruby is no longer a fringe language.

We hope to see you there. Conference details and registration.

Creating a free online Ruby on Rails course

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:17:46 GMT

This week, we’ve relaunched our Learning Rails podcast as a free online course. What’s the difference between an online course and a podcast? Content and delivery.

Content

In the Learning Rails audio podcasts, we focus on the concepts that underlie Ruby on Rails. We like audio podcasts because we can listen to them anywhere, and it’s a fine medium for explaining concepts.

But when you get to coding details, audio obviously doesn’t cut it. So now that we’ve covered all the core concepts in the eight episodes of Learning Rails, we’re switching to screencasts. In the screencasts, you’ll see our screen as we build a Ruby on Rails application, starting from scratch. We’re excited about the possibilities here and we’ll be releasing the first screencast within a couple weeks.

When you want to reproduce what you’ve seen in a screencast, it’s very helpful to have access to all the code being used. So we’ll be publishing the code under an open-source license and providing a repository that everyone can access.

We’ve recast the “show notes” pages as “lesson pages,” and we’ve enabled commenting on these pages. So participants in the course can post questions on each lesson page, and we’ll answer them there.

With this combination of features, we feel that “online course” better conveys the gist of what we’re offering than does “podcast”.

Delivery

You can still get all the podcast and screencast episodes by subscribing to the Learning Rails feed using iTunes or other software. But there’s a couple limitations with this:

Feeds are oriented toward showing the most recent episodes first, which is fine for a news podcast, but for a tutorial series you really want to see the episodes in chronological order. Some feed readers only show the first few items on the list, so if we put the lessons in order then some users will never know there are new ones.
The audio and video files delivered by the podcast don’t provide active links, so it’s harder for us to point you to the code repository and other resources.

So we’ve added an email delivery option, which we’re encouraging everyone to sign up for. By signing up for the course via email, you’ll get a message for each lesson, so you’ll get them in order. And with each lesson email, we’ll provide other relevant links, and set some context for the audio or video.

There’s two signup forms, depending on whether or not you want the audio podcasts and then the screencasts, or just the screencasts:

Learning Rails Course Signup—sign up here and you’ll get all the lessons, starting with the audio podcasts and then moving on to the screencasts. You’ll get one lesson every three days.
Learning Rails Screencast Course Signup—sign up here if you’ve already listened to the audio podcasts, or if you feel comfortable with the concepts and want to go straight to the coding. You’ll get the first screencast as soon as we release it in early April, and they you’ll get them as fast as we can put them out.

We love feedback!

We’d really like to know how the course works for you. You can leave general comments here on the blog, or post questions or comments on specific lessons on the lesson page.