Monday night I grabbed a streetcar down Queen West to check out Toronto Rails Pub Nite, a monthly gathering of Rails developers that’s been going strong for 9-10 months now. Pete Forde, one of the event’s organizers, seemed pretty impressed with the turnout, which peaked at around 30-35 people.

A lot of people were there to network and sniff out job opportunities, which is great, but what really drove me to attend was the opportunity to talk Rails. It’s something I just can’t shut up about these days, and it was great to meet some folk who share that same sense of enthusiasm. I sat in on some interesting conversations, had an enjoyable time, and look forward to the next event in January.

If there was one thing I took away though, it was this sense that Rails is the exclusive tool of the independent web developer. There were plenty of design shops and consultants in attendance that regularly pitch Rails solutions to clients, but stories of adoption at large, mostly non-technical corporations were far and few between. Is change on the horizon?

When I first started customizing the scribbish theme for the site, I wanted links in the ‘meta’ section to submit the current article to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg. Hey, everyone else does it, right? I did a little digging and wound up with the following:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.benlog.org/{{ article.url }}&title={{ article.title }}">del.icio.us</a>
<a href="http://www.digg.com/submit?phase=2&http://www.benlog.org{{ article.url }}&title={{ article.title}}">digg this</a>

Pretty simple feat, sure, but it’s just not doing it for me. Who wants these hacked up urls polluting their template code? Who knows, I might want to re-use these links elsewhere, so it couldn’t hurt if they were a little simpler, say, done via a Liquid filter. What if we could write this instead?

{ article | link_to_delicious }
{ article | link_to_digg : 'digg this' }

Wow, that’s much easier on the eyes. Okay, so that’s what I want, now how do I pull it off? I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to learn how to write custom Liquid filters for Mephisto, and share it with you guys.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve made the switch from shared hosting to my own virtual private server running Ubuntu Linux, courtesy of the folks at Slicehost. Dreamhost has been good to me, but I’ve reached the point where I want complete control over my production machine, not to mention better performance. I’m now serving benlog using a simple Lighttpd + Mongrel server combination I put together last night, and the difference is night and day.

In case the new design and renewed activity didn’t give it away, I’ve decided to re-launch my blog. In the past, it was all about me, getting up on my soapbox and sharing with friends my (perceived) difficulties of life as an undergraduate. I was young, irate – it seemed like the proper thing to do at the time.

Several years have passed. I’ve graduated, gained some real-world programming experience, and picked up an excellent pastime – learning Ruby on Rails. This time around, I really want to write articles that are helpful to people, like sharing a web development solution I’ve discovered, or say, publishing a tutorial on some undocumented Rails plugin. It can’t hurt to bone up on my writing skills either.

Anyways, I hope it will be a pleasant and useful read.