I’m working slowly, I managed to pick up a new hobby over the summer, Remote Control Cars/Trucks, and it has been consuming a lot of time, and to my girlfriend’s dismay, money. Great hobby but it can turn into a money pit when you start racing like I have. I’m sure I can make a whole post on the racing and what I’ve learned and done and so on, maybe I will tomorrow. Anyways, once the weather turns to the cold stuff we enjoy so much up here in New England, I’m planning on going full speed into the rails version of this site. I’ve dug myself a bit of a hole with it already using Wordpress for the interim, as I will now have to write some sort of import for the existing post and content on the site now. All in all it should be nice once done. I’m not sure about a design, but I am sure I’ll try and go simple and keep it along the lines of what is here now.

Work has been busy, I’ve been expanding my programming skills a great deal in the .Net world. I have made some amazing pieces of functionality for our customers. It might be my opinion but I have no shame in taking pride in the things I have made lately. I honestly was not aware of how much I knew and could get done at my previous job. I was not allowed time or opportunity to really program like I do now, and I am glad I made the change. You can take a look at the work we’ve been doing from our corporate site, Websolutions Technology Inc..

For anyone interested my girlfriend does have website finally, we got her setup on Dreamhost after a deal I could not resist. They offered $6.95 for a full year of unlimited hosting. So I set her up with a Wordpress blog like mine, and now she blogs about her quilting and crafting, and she links to her Etsy site where she sells what she makes. Feel free to take a look, http://lovejessicaalways.com.

Well off for now.

Which brings me to my second update for today, I am a free agent again. If you’ve looked at my resume you’ll notice my previous employment at Ektron Inc. has ended, and I have moved on to some contract work. I am new to the independent contractor world, but so far I am enjoying it. I am a little worried about handling the taxes for the first time like this, but I am sure my friends over at H&R Block or Jackson Hewitt will keep from being thrown to the wolves at the IRS.

Like I said above I am interested in freelance work so if you’re looking for some website development, drop me a line here. I am sure I can fit some time in between my other contracts. While I am not a designer, if only I had such talent and skill to do so, I know a great deal about web development. My main skills are mostly .Net, but I learn fast, and do have a decent amount of knowledge with PHP and of course RoR. Jump over to the about page and take a look at the resume, there is a portfolio on the way, maybe tomorrow or this weekend.

On a sidenote, anyone who has a blog should have Akismet, it’s been catching lots of spam on this little end of the interent, I can only imagine what it could do for a highly active blog. It’s a great plugin for Wordpress, and best of all free.

Apparently I am a dummy, and this book seems to be what I am looking for. It asnwers a lot of my questions about the hows and the whys, as well the all important wheres in Ruby on Rails. The book is great, written in an older version of RoR, but then again they all are. The differences between the older version the book uses and the current 2.1 version are minimal, thats a HUGE plus in my book. It minimizes the amount of time I spend trying to find the new methods, and keeps everything understandable. I recommend this book a lot if you’re trying to learn RoR.

So the theme is done, mostly, and it will be great when I am ready to implement it. That theme however is not going to be applied to this Wordpress version of the site, it will be used for the RoR version I am beginning work on (again). I have a much better idea of what I need to do, and what I want to do. As with any project I’ll start with the needs, and add in the wants when I am done. I am a firm believer in get the thing working, preferably well, before adding any new functionality. Some may differ on that sort of view, but I find the cause for that is something not based on a product’s, in this case site’s, best interests.

On a sidenote, I am trying to find some freelance sidework. As the bubble of our economy continues to collapse, I think more and more people will be looking for cheaper smaller projects to be completed to save time and cost. I would like to work on my portfolio, or lack of one currently. Please take a look at the resume, linked on my about page, and contact me if there is a fit.

Learning RoR is an interesting thing to do in my opinion. Everyone seems to write about it for one reason or another. There are lots of tutorials, articles, blog posts, conferences, etc… The one thing I keep running into is this. Almost everything I read says, “Do this, then this, then bingo you have a blog!”. That’s all fine and dandy, but I want to know why I did these things, what these things are doing, and what it will do for me. I would rather someone tell me what the relationships are, and what the syntax is. I can fit the rest of the pieces together myself usually. If anyone knows of a site or book that explains what does what in the framework, without the extra 1000+ pages of junk, please let me know.

My major hurdle with RoR is that I find 3 different sites with different guides or posts about what to do to accomplish something. All 3 will do it with a different feature in the framework, and none explain why, or what the difference is. If using scaffold, resource, and model all accomplish the same end result generally, why have 3? There must be a difference, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. API documentation is boring of course, and following in true programmer fashion I read the parts I need. If what I want isn’t readily available, I look for another source.

I am still working on styling, my mind cannot seem to do it’s job and pick something already. Even the colors I am thinking of are in a constant maelstrom of ideas. Maybe I should do them all, and have a lovely pallette switch at the top, but I hate those.

Thats all for now, if anyone actually reads this blog, please feel free to leave a comment, even just a hi to let me know I am not blogging into the abyss.