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.

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…

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.