At the last sd.rb meeting, I gave a talk on the Summer of Rails and my experience developing Graffletopia (my first SoR app).

Thanks to Chris Abad, my presentation is now online and is available as the first episode of the official sd.rb podcast.

I gotta say… it’s kinda weird seeing yourself in iTunes.

sd.rb podcast: Episode 001: Summer of Rails

Since returning from RailsConf, I’ve been working like mad on my first Rails app and Summer of Rails project.

…

So, today, I’m very happy to announce I’ve just launched Graffletopia, a website that makes it easy to share OmniGraffle stencil files. (For those who don’t know, OmniGraffle is essentially Visio for Mac… but way better, of course. And stencils are just clip art files that can be easily shared.)

Stencils are a cool part of OmniGraffle, but the list on the Omnigroup website always seemed a bit buried. Hopefully, by having a separate site for sharing stencils, it will be easier to find and share cool stencils.

I don’t think Graffletopia will ever be a huge website, but I’m willing to bet many other Mac-based web designers will find it useful.

http://graffletopia.com

Today, I’m excited to be launching Summer of Rails, a new website for the Rails community.

Like a lot of people, I’m pretty stoked about developing applications in Ruby in Rails. I’ve gotten the books, built a shopping cart, all that stuff. But I still haven’t launched my first Rails site. And I’m guessing I’m not alone.

So, here’s the Summer of Rails challenge.

• Learn Rails
• Make something useful
• Badge it

Easy, right? So let’s see how many Rails apps we can launch by the end of summer!