One of our goals is to bring more people to the Ruby on Rails platform. There are many people building web sites today who would benefit from using Rails but are stuck, largely for historical reasons, using inferior technologies.

Getting started with Rails is intimidating, however, if you’re a web developer without a deep programming background. We’ve launched the Learning Rails podcast to help web designers and developers gain the background they need to begin using Rails productively.

The first podcast provides a general overview of Rails, what it’s advantages are, where it does and doesn’t fit, and whether it is worth the investment to learn. We’ll be publishing new episodes every two weeks. We expect it to take about 10 episodes of 20-30 minutes each to cover the basics of building Rails sites.

Our goal is to lay the conceptual foundation that will make Rails more accessible for developers who are new to the platform. We also hope to enable web designers, with an interest in programming but without a computer science background, to build sites using Rails.

The podcasting process

It has been an interesting process recording the podcast and getting the infrastructure in place to support it. Here’s a few notes on what we’re using:

• Samson C01U USB microphone. This studio mic connects directly to USB, eliminating the need for any analog hardware outside of the microphone itself.

• Audacity audio editor. This seemed to be a good compromise between power and simplicity for our needs. And it is open source!

• RSS feed: We started out thinking we’d use a podcast hosting service and not have to build this ourselves. But after trying one and being unhappy with the results (they inserted an ad for another podcast in our feed!), we decided to build it ourselves. Roll your own podcast feed with Rails and Ruby’s RSS Library from Mike Sublesky’s blog was very helpful. Having complete control over the feed seems worthwhile.

• Feed distribution: we’re using Feedburner, just as for the blog, which makes sure that the feed is in good shape, converts it to other formats if required by some podcatcher, and provides us with analytics.

• Intro music: I hear a lot of podcasts using commercial music, but from what I’ve read, this is an invitation to a lawsuit, and the settlements can be very expensive. We found music at Magnatune that we could license very affordably.

We’d love to hear any feedback you may have on the podcast. Just add a comment to this posting or use our comment form.