Canada on Rails

Ben W. and I got back from Canada on Rails last night, and we had a great time. Especially fun was the ride home where between the two of us we came up with five or so ideas for cool projects to do. More on that later.

The conference rocked. You are lucky if you have tickets to RailsConf, as I'm sure it's going to rock, too. The presentations I most enjoyed were from David, Dave Astels, James Adam, and Michael Buffington. Armageddon is amazing, BDD is a big deal for us testing nuts, Rails Engines are darned handy, and you can't help but get excited about whatever Michael decides to talk about. :)

I got to meet David and laugh with him about how he ripped into me with his blog post last year. He was a little surprised that I didn't get turned off to Rails, but I assured him Rails was just too good to be driven away that easily.

At the end of David's presentation there was a little chat about plugins, and the poor state of the wiki with respect to plugins, and so I decided to get off my rear and finally implement the idea I've had for a while. Someone on the Rails mailing list a while back asked whether there was an RAA for Rails, and at the time I thought it would be great to have a more structured plugin directory. Being motivated by those comments after David's presentation, I managed to bang it out during the conference. Check out the plugin directory. I scraped a minimal amount of content from the wiki plugins page (I'll add more content soon), but now you can see all the plugins, add your own, and rate them. I'm hoping this will help people coming to Rails to find the best tools more quickly. I plan to add search and maybe a few more things to make it an excellent resource for Rails.

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