Geocoding Advanced Rails Recipes
I have a geocoding recipe coming out in Pragmatic's Advanced Rails Recipes. The recipe is titled "Finding Things by Location," and it offers how-tos and best practices on using my GeoKit plugin to, well, Find Things by Location. The most recent PDF of the beta book includes my recipe along with over 30 other recipes by community leaders like Chris Wanstrath, Dan Benjamin, and Geoffrey Grosenbach, to name just a few.
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In Portland, looking forward to Railsconf
I came up to Portland a little early this week to hang out with family before Railsconf starts on Thursday. I am excited about the conference, it's going to be a blast.
Now that the schedules are finalized, the Business of Rails panel panel I'm doing is on Saturday at 11:45-12:35.
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Win a Copy of Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax
My book, Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax, hit the streets yesterday. I've had a lot of questions about its availability in eBook / PDF format. Apress has assured me that the PDF will be available soon.
We are having a contest to win a hard-copy version of the book. See here to enter!
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"The Business of Rails" panel at RailsConf
I'm pleased to be a part of the "Business of Rails" panel at RailsConf this year. I'll be speaking alongside some major players in Rails consulting -- Justin Gehtland, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Joe O'Brien, Robby Russell, and Nathaniel Talbott. The panel is meant to answer your questions about the challenges, rewards, and dynamics of consulting with Rails.
As a one-man shop, I represent the small end of spectrum. I hope my contribution will be useful to others who are contemplating taking a similar approach, i.e, splitting your time between paid work and your own speculative projects. And, importantly, making a living doing what you enjoy with people you enjoy working with.
Again, I'm pleased to be on a panel with an esteemed group like this, and thanks to Nathaniel for pulling it together!
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REST presentation at Silicon Valley RoR
I presented on RESTful routing last night at the Silicon Valley Rails group. I stepped through some code showing how to use scaffold_resource, set up nested resources using REST, use the new named routes, and use responds_to to return information in different formats (HTML/XML/JS/JSON). I also talked about the motivations for embracing RESTful design.
The slides to this and other presentations I've given are here.
Thanks to everyone who came and listened and participated in the REST discussion!
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Speaking at SDForum next week
I will be presenting "Ruby and Google Maps" at this month's SDForum Ruby SIG, which is next Thursday (Dec 7th). If you're in the area, I'd love to see you there!
I plan on making this a pretty interactive session. I've got three broad topics, and we'll spend time on whatever you think is most interesting. The topics are:
- ImageMagick and geographic data: creating custom Google Map overlays with RMagick
- Google Maps controls: creating a better (or at least different) zoom control
- Demystifying the geocoder: you, too, can create a geocoder from scratch
Hope to see you there!
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