I decided to take up Ruby on Rails (bit late, I know). First thing I noticed is that setting it up on a Mac beats setting up Django on a Mac. I haven’t really mastered it yet, but spend most of today trying to build a simple “grocery-list-manager” that would help me and my housemates to keep track of what is spend. I’m almost done and hope to post some screenshots soon.

For now I want to place some interesting links to get you started. First there is the Ruby on Rails homepage which has a few excellent screencasts to get you going. Don’t whatch them just once, because I noticed that even if you watch them after trying a project on your own you can still find new things. The other link is this quick overview of Ruby syntax and Rails by Patrick Lenz. Although not necessary, learning a bit of basic Ruby really helps you understand some things you would normally not be able to wrap your mind around. The last link is to RadRails (free), an Eclipse based editor with integrated browser and server. I think I prefer it above TextMate (not free) but I have just started.

In response to my comparison between BarCampLondon2 and FOWA before, both Simon Willison and Dan wanted to note that they DID have a nice experience at FOWA. But then Alper came with this nice article on the Kwiqq blog where Raj Anand described his experiences at BarCampLondon2 and FOWA. Nice thing here is that Raj tried to quantify his grief in terms that you and I should be able to understand. I quote:

BarCamp (Tag: BarCampLondon2):

• Flickr: 1,545 results
• SlideShare.net: 10 results
• Google: 93,100 results
• Yahoo: 48,900 results

FOWA (Tag: FowaLondon07):

• Flickr: 930 results
• SlideShare.net: 0 results
• Google: 576 results
• Yahoo: 259 results

Although I was proud to have an OpenID login on my website, I am glad that Simon Willison noted that the plugin actually didn’t work. I managed to fix it so now anyone CAN login with OpenID. Don’t have an OpenID yet? get one here!

Don’t know what Microformats are? Go to the Microformats page, and read their wiki.

Now, no current browser supports Microformats, but there are plans to integrate this into Firefox 3. To get Microformats to work on a Mac for now you could use Firefox 2 with the Tails extention. But if you want to use Safari there is this nice CSS stylesheet that will help you discover Microformats from within Safari. The CSS doesn’t help you download the information but it does help you encountering any hidden Microformats.

With this CSS I managed to find quite alot of them at IMDB, Amazon, Plazes and Upcoming.

Last week was a quite busy week in London. Many events were planned around the hype that is FOWA (Future of Web Apps conference). I met quite alot of people at BarCampLondon2 that was 2 days before FOWA and stayed in contact with some of the people that went to FOWA afterwords. What I managed to understand about the FOWA experience is that I am happy that I didn’t pay 200 pounds to go there.

The problems where numerous. First of all the organisation was rubish for a payed event. According to Jeremy Keith there was no free WiFi and no free beverages. The atmosphere was therefore kindof below standard which led to many of the FOWA people to be found at other events in the evenings. This is how I met Andre Ribeirinho from Portugal who escaped to the Girl Geel Dinner at Wednesday.

I stayed tuned to all the interesting talks at FOWA with the help of Colin Schlueter and the use of Twitter. I was amazed that most of the interesting speeches where also given at BarCampLondon2 (for example Simon Willison’s OpenID speech), and all the others were regarded as salesmen-talk. I wonder what Dan thought of the event as he was actually not paying but working.