Last night I watched “Helvetica” a documentary about the classic typeface. It reminded me of how much I love graphic design and how long it’s been since I’ve practiced it with any zeal. It reminded me of grids, of typography and of the responsibility of the designer as the curator of the delivery of all sorts of messages.

Sadly, most of my messages these days are rooted in crass consumerism and rampant selfishness. The most altruistic thing I’ve done of late is the INSITE Entrepreneurship Census.

Suffice it to say that I’m rethinking everything. This site, my approach to my work, my career…everything.

Life’s short, and mine’s almost half over.

Time to pick up that copy of Getting Things Done, brew a strong pot of coffee and root through that inbox.

I’m currently grinding the through Learning Ruby by Satish Talim. I’ll let you know where I stumble, heaven knows I will.

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Data models, separate templates for views, and a controller to act as the traffic cop between the user, the browser and the data makes for a great way to separate code from content. It also requires you to think about your data without having to commit whole-hog. With RoR it’s easy to migrate your data schemas and the scaffolds make it easy to enter all that dummy data (roll your own Northwind database!).

This seems to be quite the trend. Since I’ve started investigating RoR, I’ve been alerted to several different flavors of the MVC approach: PHP on Trax, Django (Python), Castle (C#), etc. All use the same paradigm and use languages I’m more familiar with. However, it seems that of all the MVCs out there, Ruby on Rails is the most mature and most widely used, so I’m going to fight through the pain of learning yet another language and keep on truckin’. More to come.

Well, this developer did two things. First, I found out how to download and install Ruby on Rails. I chose to use Instant Rails since I’m not a server administrator by trade and Instant Rails is a nice self-contained package that doesn’t mangle my current setup.

Then, after trying a few “hello world” tests (yeah, yeah, I know…”n00b!”), I downloaded the pdf beta book “Agile Web Development with Rails“. It’s been very helpful so far. It’s an excellent introduction that lets you dive right in and start writing code and seeing how it works. That’s the way I learn programming languages, hack, hack, break, fix, “oh, that’s why that broke,” ad nauseum. So if you work that way, this is a good approach.

One word of caution: don’t skim the book too fast and just skip to the parts where they show you code. If you’re reading the pdf beta book, remember that many of the examples use features that are not in the current stable release of Rails. You’ll need to install “Edge Rails” to make them work.

To make Edge Rails work, you need to install Subversion (svn). Unbeknownst to me, svn is the gospel of source versioning in the world of “real programmers.” So for all you liberal arts majors and accidental webmasters out there (like me) who aren’t classically trained as programmers, have a look at how to install Subversion on Windows. Thanks be to Nick Adair, benevolent master of the Unix environment.

That ought to get you started and give me time to come up with some original material.

First and foremost, I’m a design and usability guy, so the simplicity of Ruby is very appealing. The hardest thing so far is getting the server environment set up correctly (I’m not so good with BSD commands).

Over the next few weeks, I hope to learn some more about RoR and share it with you. Now where’s that Kool Aid?

• It’s virtual: no bricks and mortar necessary.
• It’s immediate: you can register a domain name and hosting in minutes and your site will be viewable by the entire world in 48 hours at the most.
• It’s cheap: domain registration is about $8 and you can get solid hosting for development for $10/mo. WordPress is free, discussion boards are free, PHP is free, MySQL is free, Google is free…shall I go on?
• It’s text: the great thing about the Web is that it is a technology designed sharing and interpreting text files. So all you need is a text editor (free) and knowledge of your language of choice (html, php, asp, perl) and you’re off.

So don’t believe bunk about how much money you have to burn through to be successful and profitable. The Web is about a good idea and a text editor. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

I try to write as much as I can and always enjoy it when I do. If you let yourself just write fluidly about the project you’re working on, often you discover a breakthrough. Just pour your thoughts onto a legal pad, non-stop, no-editing and see if it doesn’t lead you someplace new or break through your creative wall.