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!

This is a summary of some of the challenges we’ve had with our Ruby on Rails Git migration and attempting to use submodules for vendor/rails and various plugins. We’ve run in to problems switching and merging between branches with and without submodules. Once I work this all out, I’ll write up a “real” article for BuildingWebApps.com.

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

While I hold down the development cave this week with a broken foot (long story), Michael is representing us at Web 2.0 in San Francisco this week. If you are there, look him up!

InformationWeek did a quick interview with Michael to ask about Ruby on Rails. Besides that blog post, there is a YouTube video of Michael talking about both Ruby on Rails and what we are doing at BuildingWebApps.com as well the bigger story behind Collective Knowledge Works, Inc.

Digg the interview if you like.

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.

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