Announcing BuildingWebApps.com
Posted 3 September 2007
When I started this blog almost a year ago, I really wasn’t sure what I’d be writing about. As it happened, it ended up being much more technical than I had envisioned, and focusing a great deal on building and deploying Ruby on Rails applications.
I haven’t written nearly as much as I would like about Rails, in part because this blog felt like not quite the right place for it—I want something with a richer information architecture.
In the past year, I’ve collected a huge list of links to useful blogs, valuable references, ebooks, mailing lists, conferences, and other resources. There’s a tremendous amount of information available on the web, and itâs hard to imagine learning all this technology without the web as a resource. But this information is widely scattered, and while a google search will sometimes lead you quickly to the best resource to answer a given question, often it takes quite a bit of sleuthing. Rails itself makes it relatively easy to build an application to organize and present all this information—a curious sort of virtuous circle.
In the past few months, I’ve been working with my colleague Christopher Haupt on just such an application: BuildingWebApps.com. The BuildingWebApps.com main site is currently in a limited private beta, but you can visit the site now and sign up to receive an invitation when we’re ready to accept more beta users.
Update, January 2016: After the first year or so, the press of other business made it impossible for us to keep BuildingWebApps.com updated, with new versions of everything constantly coming out. We let the site sit for a few years, but I’ve finally decided to take it down. It would be a massive effort to bring it up to date, and there are many other resources now.
For historical reference, I have posted a large-functional static snapshot of the site, as well as a PDF version.