Robby on Rails

On Saturday, I found myself reading an invitation to Foo Camp 2005.

It’s basically a SUPER SECRET invitation-only (150 ppl) 3 day camp out near O’Reillys headquarters in Sebastapol, California.

I am most definitely going to try my best to make it down for this. Camping + Free Wifi + Cool Geeks = Foo Camp!

Thanks O’Reilly!

I added it to my 43Places. :-)

It was hard to resist the desire to utilize a Rails application during the process of working on my book. I got Hieraki installed the other day and copied over a lot of the work that I have been doing in another program, and am now using Hieraki for a lot of my first draft writing. As it’s fairly flexible and I can access it just about any where through our vpn at Planet Argon.

O’Reilly provides a fancy MS Word template… with a fancy toolbar specific to their formating style. However, I don’t want to sit in front of my laptop to work and working in Word just isn’t my ideal scenario. So, I am doing most of my work in Hieraki first and then transferring it to Word and formating it to their style. (no, the template doesn’t work in OOo…sigh)

The reason that I like Hieraki is that it is allows me to get content into the system really quickly. I was considering a wiki for all my research work, but Hieraki seems to be doing exactly what I needed.

Thanks to Tobias for (yet another) great tool!

Now that I have signed myself over to O’Reilly, I am looking at my deadlines and feeling pretty energetic about the whole thing. Over the past 30 hours or so, I have received loads of emails, comments, and blog posts in regards to my book signing. I wanted to let you all know how much I appreciate it. Your support has definitely given me even more energy to put into this project.

In regards to how I will blog my writing, I will probably not discuss too many of the details of the work that I am working on, but I plan to continue writing tutorials and overviews of things that I find of interest in regards to Ruby on Rails.

Luckily, my employer (being your own boss rules!) is kind enough to allow me to devote a lot of my time over the coming months to write this book. :-)

Again, thanks for the positive feedback!

Okay, I was given the go-ahead by my editor to make some sort of announcement.

I have just started working on a Ruby on Rails book for your favorite publisher, O’Reilly.

...more details at eleven.

UPDATE I have started collecting your information here at http://www.programmingrails.com

Be notified when the book is coming out!