Coderplay

Kennesaw State University (in Georgia, US) is hosting their own copy of RSS2HTML for their use. RSS2HTML is a script I wrote that can be used to publish RSS feeds in web pages in two different ways.

The first is to generate a line of code (JavaScript, PHP or HTML) that developers can paste into web pages to style and publish their RSS feed through my server.

Kennesaw State University has implemented the alternative method which uses their own server.

Since RSS2HTML is available under the MIT license users run their own copy of RSS2HTML via their own servers. It al so means people can make their own changes to RSS2HTML (and hopefully they'll share those changes back to my repo on Github).

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on my first application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it's now been approved for the iTunes App Store.

The application is called "Oz Quiz", and it's a quiz with over 600 questions about Australia, covering history, politics, popular culture, our indigenous people, environment, technology, arts, music, sport, geography, law, demography, and more.

It's been an interesting process to develop the app, which I'll be posting on very soon; but in short, the signup and review process with Apple was very easy, and working with jQTouch is mostly easy, and overall I only had a few issues worth mentioning.

Figaro Pho, a series of 1-minute television animations broadcast on ABC1 earlier this year, whose Flash-based interactive site Katalyst built early this year, won 2 AFI Awards last Saturday, in the categories of Best Children’s Television Animation and Outstanding Achievement in Television Screen Craft.

Big congratulations to Luke Jurevicius and the guys from Vishus Productions!

The interactive website for Figaro Pho also won an ATOM award a few weeks ago, in the category of Best Interactive / Video Game.

Congratulations to Haydn for his outstanding flash work and to everyone involved in the project for creating an award-winning site!

I'm only sad I didn't get to work on the project myself :).

I attended Railscamp Melbourne last week, and it was awesome^awesome (yes, that's awesome to the power of awesome). There were tons of presentations:

• Declare War on Everything with Chaser, by Andrew Grimm (sorry I missed this one, I was getting pwned by the mazes at Ashcombe Gardens).
• Advanced Thinking Sphinx, by Pat A llan (great beard, great man).
• An intro to test-driven development, to produce a working twitter clone called twatter (users are nicknamed twats). Shoutouts to Bodaniel Jeanes and Perryn of ThoughtWorks for this one, it went for about 3 hours but was all the better for it.
• How to be good at rails, by Ryan Bigg (hope your voice is feeling better :)).
• Warden, which is a Rack-based authentication system by Daniel Neighman, and
• Pancake by same; pancake looks like merb slices on steroids, served with strawberries and cream.
• Scrum by Breccan McLeod-Lundy.
• Kanban by Perryn (Perryn was inspired to do this presentation by Breccan's one on Scrum).
• MacRuby by Geoffrey Grosenbach and Marcus Crafter.
• Shells and shell tips, run by Geoffrey as well.
• Introduction to vim by Charles Dale and Andrew France.
• Patching other people's projects with the safety of tests (using the example of adding HTML5 support to Webrat), by Bodaniel Jeanes (again, I missed this due to being stuck in a maze, if it helps I got soaked by rain).
• Video encoding by yours truly; note sweet ruby script that does all the hard work for you.
• Introduction to Gistory and Webstats, also by yours truly (warning: contains dangerous amounts of win).
• Amazing refactoring of Gistory, carried out by Myles, Pat, and Tim Lucas. Myles saw my Gistory introduction, saw the code and immediately started laughing; so they decided to refactor it and then Pat added tests and refactored part of the codebase live. This started around 11-11:30PM and didn't finish till 2AM. I have to say this was my favourite part of railscamp (followed by the intro to testing). MASSIVE shouts to Pat, Myles and Tim for organizing this, and to all who attended for their input.

Big thanks to the posters on the Railscamp Google group, from whom I stole much of the list of presentations, as I have forgotten ;).

This list may be incomplete, and I'm missing the slides for a bunch of them. If you have links, please put them in the comments.

Presentations were just a part of Railscamp though. There was Brains, which took a large part of people's attention. It was pretty awesome seeing everyone work to try and beat each other using ruby, especially on the big screen as it was.

Sunday night was the closing presentations, which let people show off the code they'd been working on over the weekend (this part 'borrowed' from Andrew Grimm [hope you don't mind]):

• Charity ad server
• Codeyak, by the guys from Cogent Consulting
• Javascript based validation
• Zombino by Ryan Bigg
• Word frequency analysis (for the benefit of people learning new languages)
• Let's do stuff!
• Basic game engine in JavaScript by James (I think? [again I suck at names])
• Automatic client-side form validations with formtastic and JQuery.
• Publishus and pretty buttons for formtastic
• Rails index - tagging versioning of rails information, by Nigel Rausch
• Painting with Ajax
• Converting an inefficient paper-based system of fostering out pets into a Rails app
• Some sort of couchdb authentication - proxy stack?
• Banana platform game (I love bananas with moustaches) by Carl Woodward

Awesome prizes for the above were donated by a bunch of great sponsors, I can't remember all of them so I won't try :).

And then there was lots and lots of booze.

And there was Werewolf, run by Pat Allan once again; there's nothing like going to bed at 5AM after a long Werewolf session then getting up at 9:30AM to get on the bus back to the airport.

And there's even more, but I think this post is quite long enough so I'll leave it here. If you have links for any of the projects here, please add them in the comments.

If you're a ruby dev thinking about going to a Railscamp, DO SO. I had a fantastic time, and it wouldn't have happened without the organisers Ben Schwarz, John Barton, and Pat Allan. Thanks guys!

(Edited 30 November 2009 to add some people who's names I had forgotten and to correct some info).

I submitted webstats as a notable new project to Github Rebase a while back, but my message got dropped on the floor apparently, because qrush had missed it when I asked about it recently; I re-sent it and it got into Github Rebase #28, which is an 11 out of 10 on the awesome scale.

I only noticed this today, missed it when the post was made :). I’m very grateful that qrush has decided to include it, and this should bring some development love to webstats.

If anyone has patches, ideas for webstats, just email me and I’ll see what I can do.