Empty Thoughts

I’m not really sure how I missed out on this. The Pragmatic Programmers has a new offering of Pragmatic Screencasts that cover subjects such as Core Animation, Erlang, Ruby, Active Record, and Expression Engine. At $5 per episode it’s definitely a great buy. I just got the four episodes in the Erlang by Example series and I’m making my way through them. The screencasts are professional, well done, and great resource for get up to speed on a focus subject. I’m looking forward to seeing new topics down the road. Perhaps something on Django? I highly recommend them!

In this screencast I cover implementing model based feeds using the syndication framework.

We’ll start where we left off last time and enhance our simple blogging application by adding feeds for individual sections of the website. We will walk through modifications to the urls.py, implementation of a model based Feed class, and changes to our base template to expose the feeds. Finally I will briefly cover how you can use Atom feeds in place of RSS.

Source code for the example application is provided below. Please be sure to read the README for information about requirements.

Downloads

Regular (51.6 MB, 33:06, H.264, MP4)

IPod (28.6MB, 33:06, H.264, MP4)

Source Code (124 KB)

Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

In this screencast I cover implementing Django’s syndication framework into an existing application. We’ll start with a simple blogging application and walk through what it takes to get syndication (rss feeds) implemented, covering modifications to the urls.py, implementation of a Feed class, creation of the templates, as well as adding syndication auto-detection in the browser.

Source code for the example application is provided below. Please be sure to read the README for information about requirements.

Downloads

Full Quality (135.8 MB, 15:11, Apple Animation)

Medium Quality (19.7 MB, 15:11, H.264)

IPod & Apple TV (24.4MB, 15:11, Apple Animation)

Source Code (112 KB)

Requires QuickTime

Note, I apologize for the large file sizes. I’m working on getting the compression settings correct, while still preserving the quality of the screencast. I didn’t want to hold off posting this any longer. The next one should be much improved.

I appreciate any and all feedback, both positive and negative.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Ryan Bates of Railscasts for giving me some pointers and help along the way. If you do Rails development you definitely need to check out Ryan’s work as well as support what he’s doing.

If you’re in the Indiana / Kentucky area (referred to affectionately as Inducky), the local community is hosting a Day of .NET. It is a good way to come up to speed on a lot of the new technologies out there in the Microsoft world. Here’s the event information:

KY – Day of .NET
Friday, August 31st, 2007
8:30am to 5:00pm
Louisville, KY – Sullivan University

(Map It!)

The “KY – Day of .NET� event is a free day of .NET training. This event has been organized by the community, for the community. This day-long event will consist of a series of discussions on cutting edge technologies, including:

• Silverlight
• Windows Communication Foundation
• ASP.NET AJAX
• SQL Reporting Services
• SQL Server 2008
• LINQ
• Windows Vista Search APIs
• Windows Workflow

Though the event is free of charge, you are strongly encouraged to register here. A confirmation e-mail will be sent to you informing you of the beginning time. Free parking is available on the Sullivan University campus.

Ryan Bates provides an excellent collection of Ruby on Rails screencasts for free. If you have a couple of minutes, literally, please check out what he’s put together.

Some time ago I had envisioned producing something similar, but in no way could I have even come close to this. Ryan really nails it, with high production quality and keeping it concise. Show him some love.

Pragmatic Studio has announced that they will be offering Advanced Ruby Training in Reston, VA on July 18 – 20, 2007. I don’t know if I can swing another training this year, but if I do it will most certainly be this course. Those of us at Advanced Rails Training in Chicago got a little taste of what will be offered. We were fortunate to get an hour or so of meta programming and discussion of Ruby bindings by Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas. I left certainly wanting a whole lot more of it.

This past week I attended Advanced Rails Training in Chicago that was put on by Pragmatic Studio. Pragmatic Studio is Mike Clark’s training company and includes Ruby / Rails heavy weights Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas.

It was a great experience and I highly recommend that you attend one of the Pragmatic Studios in the future. What is always interesting about these types of events is that the value in attendance has to as much with the offline discussions as it does with the training program itself. There were so many great people that I had an opportunity to get to know and others that I got to get reacquainted with. I was especially fortunate because Mike Mangino, founder of Elevated Rails, put me up and chauffeured me around. I learned so much from Mike during my stay. I highly recommend his company if you need a quality solution for your next Rails project.

There was also another unique opportunity for the attendees of the Advanced Rails training program. David Chelimsky, lead developer on RSpec, was also in attendance and was kind enough to give us all a special presentation (including fine libations donated by Object Mentor) on RSpec one evening. David discussed RSpec, it’s history, it’s use in Rails applications, and how to make the transition. His presentation was exactly what I needed to get me over the BDD hump. I’ve decided that my next project will be using RSpec and hopefully I’ll have more to say about that as I get into it.

All in all it was a whole lot of fun. If you want to god deeper into Rails development, or if you’ve had your head down and need to get updated on the latest Rails approaches, like Simply Helpful, Capistrano deployment, Restful Routes, etc…, head on over to the Pragmatic Studio website and get signed up for the next available course.