Gnomedex 2008

30 Aug 2008

I’m a little late in writing this, and I won’t do it the justice it really deserves, but I had to finally get out a blog post about how much I enjoyed attending Gnomedex. This was the first time I had attended, and I had a fantastic time.

I had considered attending in previous years, but I never got a good sense for what I’d encounter there, so I didn’t want to throw down the $$ and end up being disappointed. Well, I really had no clue what it would be like this year, either, but I kept hearing such good things about it that I decided to risk it.

And am I glad I did! It was an amazing few days, with motivational, funny, and deeply moving presentations. As a technologist, I was just blown away with the amazing things people are doing with the technologies that I help create. Beyond that, the people at the conference were just excellent people to be around — the vibe was definitely different from your typical tech conference, in a good way.

I had a fantastic time. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone. Chris put on an amazing program, and I’m looking forward to attending next year.



Content-based sites with paid memberships

7 Aug 2008

If you’ve ever wanted to create your own content-based web site that requires paid memberships, now you can do so easily with Ruby on Rails, Radiant, and the Content Management Rails Kit.

Built on the same recurring billing code used in the Software as a Service Rails Kit, the CMS Rails Kit is an extension to Radiant that enables you to have various paid or free membership levels for a content site. So you could easily implement a pay wall for your content, or simply require registration to access it.

Information may want to be free, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to charge for it anyway. :)