Taking another stab at RoR

Late last week I started looking around for the best free time tracking tool for my work hours and projects (PS: Best one I could find is Toggl.) The actual search got me thinking about how I’d make a time tracking site and that got me thinking about other things I could use Ruby on Rails for which of course led me to the Build a Blog in 15 Minutes screencast which then got me looking for Locomotive at home last night. Locomotive is an all inclusive package to use Rails on a Mac. It includes Ruby, MySQL Lite, Rails, and whatever server stuff you need to run it locally — clearly I’m a prime candidate for using something like this. Note: if interested, the download I found by Googling didn’t work. Instead, you should use this one.

Esquire’s Napkin Project

Lately I’ve been really into reading the fiction stories on Esquire’s Napkin Project. It’s sort of old at this point, but basically, Esquire mailed out square napkins, like you’d find in a restaurant, to authors or various levels of experience, asked for some kind of fiction, and posted what they received back.

It’s crazy how much engrossing some of these are given the space constraints. Some of my favorites include this one, this one, this one, and this one.

I wish this had been an assignment for one of my English classes in school. Even though I didn’t take any creative fiction writing courses, I think this would’ve been so fun. If I ever become a college professor of English 100, maybe I’ll make it part of the curriculum.

Dooce as the Blogging Model

Monday, Dooce announced what we all should have seen coming: “The new dooce® community!” I read the post on my lunch break, clicked through a few of the brand new community pages, and signed up.

It’s fantastic. It’s basically like a better Yahoo! Answers with added social networking features and the assurance that the people interacting with you probably aren’t crazy because they’re Dooce fans.

In the year or so that I’ve followed Dooce’s website, I’ve been pretty fascinated with it (see old post, “Modern Rules of Blogging”). To me, it seems to be THE great blogging success story (The same blog that got her fired from her job years later supports her family? Come on, that’s awesome.). Not to mention, arguably, THE blogging business model. She writes about what she cares about, writes well, her content appeals to a wide audience, and now she’s added this new feature to give fans another reason to visit and stay on her site. I mean, she’s got the following. She should capitalize on it while further adding value to her site. The fact is Dooce.com has tons of ads and money-making devices all over the place, but they don’t distract from the content. And in a way, when I click through and see a bunch of ads, it makes me happy to know I’m helping with the ad revenue because the site is great and should be rewarded. Maybe that’s the sign of a truly successful blog.