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I have finally managed to get RMagick installed and working correctly on my Powerbook. This post is just a little heads up for people who are having trouble and had not realized that the RMagick tarball has a README file explaining the procedure in detail. This is were I should have gone in the first place, duh!

After reading about it a lot, I finally got round to installing Ruby on Rails onto my Powerbook. Oh and for those scratching their heads, Ruby on Rails is a framework for building web applications fast and was used to create sites like Odeo and Backpack.

It was actually a fairly simple process, just a matter of going through the help docs. One thing I will pass on though. Once I had it installed and started and had the built in WEBrick server running. I would go to the URL of my app and it wouldn’t work. Anyway to cut a long story short instead of using http://localhost/myApp, if I used http://127.0.0.1/myApp everything worked. This only took me about 8 hours to work out

I also downloaded the new book ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’. It should be available in print by the end of the month but as I was going on holiday I thought it might be nice to gen up while I was away.

Well, it is indeed a fast way to develop. I had a working app that could easily read write and edit to a database in about 10mins. I am still learning but I am really getting on at speed. Once you’ve got your head around how the framework operates complex tasks are generally do-able in a couple of lines or code. To finish, here’s a great link to a movie that explains how you can build a blog engine in 15mins with Ruby on Rails

I have been using Ta-da Lists for a couple of months to keep track of the list to things I need to do, read, watch extra. It is such a simple idea. If you have never heard of it, it is a simple online way to keep track of all the little things you need to get done. It’s free and well worth checking out.