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.

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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!

The sixth screencast is posted and should be propagating to iTunes and our email lists now. In this episode we do something quick (show setting up acts_as_textiled), then show something else that should be quick, but turns in to a reality check.

Michael walks through “dropping in” in-place editing to our simple CMS, and quickly demonstrates what happens when you have to scratch the surface of Rails: things don’t work as documented, things may not have documentation, plugins can quickly drift out of sync with the current releases of Rails (edge or otherwise), you may have to sift through Rails bug reports to find “just the right patch”.

Blue Oyster Cult may have gotten it right with Hot Rails to Hell.

The great thing (???) is that almost certainly someone has had to cover this ground before and a little targeted use of Google will yield a clue. The thing that absolutely sucks is that almost certainly someone has had to cover this before, proposed a fix that is gathering dust, and you have to dig for it.

Of course, that’s where we hope to help…trying to expose the rough, dark edges AND help provide useful documentation/links/screencasts that will smooth those corners.

This week’s screencast (lesson 13) rounds out the Admin pages refactor tasks we started in lesson 12. When we were recording the original lesson 12, it ran way over our typical target of 25 minutes or so, so we broke it into a part 1 and part 2. I’m not a good enough video editor to fix up the prompts you see in the lesson 13 screencast in post-production, so yes, they still say lesson 12. Sorry for any confusion!

Behind the scenes, we are still working on our tool set and are discussing the best way to deliver the videos. Right now, we provide the full Quicktime movie for either download or playing directly in your browser/iTunes/RSS Reader. I’m contemplating putting zipped up versions online too, so those of you who download the movies for local/offline play can benefit from smaller downloads. If this interests you, drop me a line here or via our BuildingWebApps contact form.

-Chris

This week’s Learning Rails online course screencast covers authentication and walks through using Rick Olsen’s restful_authentication plugin (and plugins in general). We are taking our time through each of these topics to try to provide as much general information as possible without making the pace too slow. Comments on the episodes seem generally positive, but we’d always like to hear more.

We have a general outline for the various future episodes, but we are also incorporating feedback from viewers and starting to incorporate a “refactoring” portion of the ‘cast to fix up or explain something that may have been less than clear. We’ll also use watchers/listener feedback to influence future episode content, so keep those comments coming.

On the back-end side, a few updates.

As we improve our skills on screencasting (blame the editing on me! I’m the videographer in training), we will play around a little with making the visuals as clear as possible. We are close to finding our “final” tool set, and I’ll blog about that in the next few weeks once things settle down. We are still trying to record some of the content concurrently, with Michael and I in different cities. Sometimes, we still need to record separate takes and I merge them in post-production. This week we’ve been trying out Adobe’s Acrobat Connect as the cross-platform (at least Mac Friendly) screen sharing solution.

Leopard’s iChat screen sharing is really nice, but hasn’t been working for us lately (reasons unknown). Also, since we both run on dual monitors (or more), iChat is a little annoying in that it can’t target specific screens for sharing. If anyone has a hack to work-around this, I’d love to hear it. Acrobat Connect allows you to share a specific screen, which is nice.

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.

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.

As part of the LearningRails morph from a plain podcast to an online course, we are transitioning over the next couple of weeks from audio only to screencasts and other supplemental materials. This week’s release of lesson 8 is all about setting up a new development machine so you can follow along with the course.

We wanted to have a set of instructions for the common OS platforms that we could tweak from time to time as needed for the online course and the in-person seminar. In February, we shared with our students a very basic outline and then pointers to some of the better blog posts and articles out there. Unfortunately, we learned that little things change with various OS patches and software releases, typically faster than these external articles are reviewed (if at all).

Long story short, we just published four articles, one each for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

After scratching out and running through these articles multiple times trying to get the bugs out, I’m dreaming about installers now. Please take a look and pass on any suggestions or problems you might have when trying these out.

We’ve enabled comments on article pages now, so if you have a good tip to share (or a bug), please add it to the appropriate page. You can find the current comment entry pod on the right side of the article, near the top (better UI is coming!).

-Chris

As promised, we’ve just pushed out Episode 7. It covers the ins and outs of Ruby on Rails testing support, from the basic terminology, through the technology, and all the way to some of the current philosophies on the topic.

The Ruby on Rails community has recently discovered Behavior-Driven Development which is very cool, but I think a lot of mileage can be achieved with the technique it was spawned from, Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development (see the book of similar name).

For the new practitioner, getting any tests going is a step in the right direction. This happens to also be an area where the current literature for Ruby on Rails developers is growing stale, so we hope to add some useful content in future BuildingWebApps.com articles too.

If you have useful testing links or stories of how TDD saved your bacon, please let us know.

As promised, here is one of my occasional travel updates for those interested in meeting in person.

Next week, Michael and Christopher will be in San Francisco hosting our Rails Quick Start seminar on February 20th – 21st, 2008. We still have limited room left if you’d like to attend and get up to speed on Rails!

Christopher will be in Miami starting February 27th – March 1st, 2008 for the Future of Web Apps conference. He’ll likely be speaking about BuildingWebApps.com at BarCampMiami on the 28th.

Michael and Christopher will be at SXSW (South-by-Southwest) Interactive March 7th-11th, 2008 in Austin, TX.

We’d love to meet BuildingWebApps.com visitors or Learning Rails listeners. Drop us a line or catch us in person at any of the above events!

That’s a whacky title…

A few folks have asked if the next Learning Rails episode is still planned for next week given the overlap with our seminar preparations. The answer is absolutely! I’ll post again when it is out Monday, but in the next episode we are covering the basic concepts around testing in all of its various flavors. You’ll also have to excuse the coining of a new term…those of you who have known me for a while know I have a knack for naming things that become terms that just won’t die. In this case, after an explanation of Test Driven Development, I’m laying claim to the term for the opposite of “Test First Developers” being “Test After Developers”, as in “a TAD too late”. It probably isn’t clear where I stand on testing.

Although there is a lot of attention being cast on other “fill-in-the-blank” driven development, we’ll be sticking to simple testing and modest TDD coverage at our seminar. While I believe strongly in these concepts, the sheer quantity of new information for folks is overwhelming, and I want to keep with the general coverage of the overall getting started topic in an introductory course.

I admit having that stereo-typical engineering(?) trait of liking shiny new tools. It is always interesting to me to find a new and more efficient way of getting a task done, and I’m particularly fond of automation in my development practices. I’ve also been through enough project cycles to understand the trap of the golden hammer and the need to be very open to trying something new.

With that in mind, it was a lot of fun to enter the Ruby on Rails development world over the last couple of years and start sampling the offerings. Because of its relative newness, the tools world for both Ruby and Rails is a bit more sparse than other technologies. Due to its high profile and popularity, though, it is catching up quickly.

In our latest podcast, Episode 6 we direct our attention towards the tool ecosystem for Ruby and Rails, and present a whirl-wind tour of some of the tool categories and popular choices in those categories. In almost all of the tools we mention, we’ve had an opportunity to at least try them, and very much recommend you do the same. The great thing about most of the available tools is that they are open source offerings, so you can try freely and even make contributions back if you can. In the cases of the commercial tools we mention, the various vendors are paying serious attention to the community, and staying on top of the rapid evolution of the platform.

In the future, we’ll be adding many more links to tools to BuildingWebApps.com, so check there for more articles and resource links. We’d also like to hear from you regarding your favorite “must have” tool for your web development utility belt. If there are tools that you would like us to write-up, let us know that too.

Our fifth podcast episode has been posted today. In it, we dig a little deeper and explore some of the ins and outs of Rails form processing. At a conceptual level, we explain how forms and models work together, and the glue that binds them within the controller. Along the way, we touch on validation, error message passing, and utilizing Ajax techniques.

We received some great feedback for “more code”. We hear you! The show notes for the current series really are just showing snippets and are intended to simply illustrate a concept. In time, we’ll be going in to things in more depth, and at that point, we’ll provide full working source files.

Currently, we are working on preparation tasks for the RailsQuickStart. If you are just starting out, and not only want the concepts but also want to get your hands dirty with some friendly folks at your side, this is the place to be in February. The code we are using in the seminar will be a useful starting point for your own sites, and in it, we will be showing compete working examples of most of the concepts we cover in the podcast.

We published Episode 4 – Rails Models last night, in the face of everything Mother Nature could throw at California. I don’t recall seeing in any of the podcasting books and blogs I’ve read how to set up your gear using gas generators and sound proofing for gale-force winds, but I suppose we should add that to our list of gear. Michael was also a bit “under the weather”, no pun really intended, so between the two of us, please don’t mind our sound quality!

We’ve received some feedback about the effectiveness of trying to teach programming in an audio only format. We completely understand this criticism, and I wanted to briefly reflect on it here.

Our intention with this first series of podcasts is not to actually teach hard-core coding or architecture, but rather to do a first pass discussing the overall concepts that make up Ruby on Rails and its various components. We provide some modest code examples in the show notes, but what we shoot for is to reinforce the overall concept, not show a complete example.

In the future, we plan on other series of podcasts that will get into more programming/development detail, and are in complete agreement that to do so, a true multimedia presentation typically works best (audio, video, full examples). We would also, of course, shoot for much more detailed precision as we move from an introductory level to an intermediate one.

So, give the latest a listen and please keep the feedback coming. Thanks to all who have posted on iTunes, and if you get a chance and like the podcast, consider digging us.

-chris

We are happy to be posting episode 3 of the LearningRails.com podcast this week (“Rails Views: Where The Rubber Meets The Road”) and thank everyone for the feedback, ideas, and reviews to date. In episode 3 we begin to explore the Rails View system, discussing templates, partials, helpers, and other basics to getting something visible on a web page. We don’t go in to the details of Forms in episode 3, but will in a future episode.

The next episode will be detouring to Models and database usage, getting listeners in tune with the basics to manipulating data the “Rails Way”.

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement to do more podcasts, more frequently. Currently, we are deep in preparation for the upcoming launch of BuildingWebApps.com phase 2, which we are really excited about. More on that soon. In any event, that development and content work, plus preparations for the curriculum for the RailsQuickStart.com seminar will keep things at Collective Knowledge Works humming along. At this point, we will be continuing to introduce new episodes every two weeks.