"building the capacity of public media and technology organizations"
Haven't done a field report in a long time (again). The password to this thing always seems to get funky and then it gets put off until later. That's the best excuse I have at the moment.
Whoops, it's been a while since I've done one of these things. So my car was unable to pass smog and I'm currently trying to get the guy who sold it to me to give me my money back and he's dodging my calls. Thankfully my boss knows someone in Marin (where I got it) who used to do lemon law stuff and now does legal aid, so hopefully she can put the fear of God in him.
Comment from John Dorman on October 27, 2009 - 10:55am
Colleen, I have a friend who is good at Ruby on Rails..she sometimes takes projects as a freelancer. email me if you want more info: essfilms@gmail.com
-John
I am still working on the CMS.
I am investigating how we can accept uploads of Microsoft Word documents and extract the content from them to convert to our format.
Most recently I contributed some test cases to the tests that get run repeatedly to defend against breaking the code.
Comment from Kevin Palmer on January 24, 2008 - 3:02pm
Hey Jack,
As always I'm impressed by your Ruby know-how. One quick question: for an amateur like myself where would be a good place to start learning Ruby-on-Rails basics/how did you learn it? Thanks!
Comment from Jack Waugh on January 24, 2008 - 4:27pm
Hey, Kevin.
I started learning (I still have a lot to learn when it comes to the Rails framework) from Hansson, Thomas Heinemeier: _Agile Web Development with Rails_. However, I have heard at least one other Rails developer cite some other book, that I don't remember, that he said he liked better than Hansson's. You might want to scan some of the fora for conversations where others have asked for book recommendations and the more experienced people have responded. Maybe you'll see two or three reviews putting some other book above that one. Not that it's a bad book; I think its approach teaches quite well. He begins with the simplest working examples and builds on those.
One problem with writing about Rails is that Rails evolves pretty fast by comparison to the time scale on which books get published.
By the way, I came across a development that's maybe to the alpha-test stage, for which the author claims programming efficiency to put Rails to shame. See Flower.
Comment from Jack Waugh on January 25, 2008 - 10:30am
My mentor just wrote to me, "As an aid in learning Rails, and if you haven't already, I strongly suggest
spending some time with the screencasts at http://railscasts.com ". Those are free. Our other co-worker routinely watches one of those while he has his lunch, and he says they have informed him greatly.
Comment from Lee Goodrich on April 27, 2010 - 2:50pm
That's too bad that your RoR project isn't getting off the ground. I haven't used Ruby but I am currently teaching myself Django which is basically the Python equivalent and I'd love the opportunity (i.e. motivation) to work on an actual implementation.
Burning Man has low-income tickets!? Hmm, $160 isn't bad, but did you find any good deals for airfare? Timing could be better, considering that'll be around the time I should hopefully be starting a shiny-new, Post-VISTA job, but maybe I could postpone a few weeks to go to this...if I wasn't so broke as to need the job to pay for the trip. Oh, the cyclical dependency of my desires!
Comment from Colleen Beach on April 27, 2010 - 4:12pm
I thankfully don't have to worry about airfare. I have friends in the North Bay who go every year so I'm just hitching a ride with them. Otherwise I probably won't be able to afford it either.