Grand Plans for A Ruby on Rails Community

A couple days ago Bill Turner posted on railstips.org that he no longer had time to upkeep the site and wondered if anyone wanted it. Ummm…yes. Of late, I have been feverishly consuming anything that I can about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I have noticed of late a lot of chatter concerning the lack of a high signal to noise, spam free Rails community. My goal for Rails Tips is to become that.

The Plan

Step 1: Audience

First things first, I purchased a copy of Mint and redirected the feed to feedburner. I wanted to get some idea as to the traffic and subscribers. First day totals–17 visitors, 3 subscribers. That was just for any

Step 2: Submitting Tips

The next thing I would like to do with Rails Tips is make some kind of system to allow tips to be submitted, reviewed by me and published to the site. Currently, tips can only be submitted by email. I am a firm believer in making things as easy as possible because if something is a pain, people won’t do it. I will be posting tips from my personal learnings and from articles around the web, but I would love to see Rails Tips completely running off reader tips.

Step 3: Custom Design

Once the site is running smoothly, I want to create a custom theme for Typo. I hate using themes developed by others. I feel as though site designs need to be unique and specific and that no generic template can accomplish what I have in mind. Steve has mentioned an interest in throwing something together, so look for a beautiful update to the site’s aesthetics before too long. Also, sometime in the near future Rails Tips (and Addicted To New for that matter) will be running on a brand spanking new, not ready to be unvailed blogging system (more on that later).

Step 4: Code Review

Once the design is toight like a tiger and submitting tips is really easy, I would like to add a semi-public code review section. It would basically be a place where readers could submit code snippets to be reviewed by a panel of “experts.” Submitted snippets that were deserving would recieve a review of sorts by the panel, tweaked and revised until the code was considered “a best practice.” I can see those snippets that have made it through the review process becoming official tips on the site. Above all I want to keep the code and tips that flow through the site to be quality.

Interested?

Where to go from there, I haven’t thought about but I think that this would be a great start. Rails needs a place where people can find tips and best practices with a high signal to noise ratio. I’m planning on making Rails Tips just that place. It appears as though I have a lot of work ahead of me. If any of this sounds interesting to you and you would like to get involved or have ideas, contact me by form or instant message (AIM: johnnunemaker). I really want to make this work.