Part two of the chat with Scott Lake.

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A three part series with Scott Lake as he chats about the newest Rails app, Shopify.

A continuation of our chat with Aaron Boeving of Clear Function, makers of Chalksite.

Brief interview with Aaron Boeving of Clear Function that has introduced Chalksite.

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It’s funny. Doing the most basic things in Rails are really simple. If you’ve seen the intro to rails demo video, you know what I’m talking about. But, scaffolding is really only about 1% of the magic of Rails.

The funny thing is… the scaffolding in the video is what drew many of us to the upstart framework in the first place. It just made things look so easy.

Of course, it was also the scaffolding that confused many of the initial critics of RoR.

Many of these critics, who didn’t take a hard enough look at Rails, thought its magic lay in the scaffolding. Silly detractors, scaffolding is for kids!

Note for non-techies: scaffolding is basically throw-away code that helps you rapidly prototype the functionality of an app.

The Magic of Rails != Its Nifty Scaffolding Feature

Once you spend a good amount of time developing a complex Rails application, you see first-hand that scaffolding is just a very, very tiny part of the framework.

Much has been written about this before, but the beauty of Rails lies in abstracting away the dull, boring parts of coding and development … allowing you to focus on the good stuff—fixing bugs and adding features!

Another great thing about Rails is that you can follow the rabbit hole just about as far down as you’d like.

There’s always something new on the horizon, such as integration tests and Selenium (JavaScript-powered, browser-based) acceptance testing.

That magic feeling …. of actually loving to code!

Really digging into Rails makes me feel like I did back when I first learned Java for the first time. PHP never made me feel that way.

With Rails, that loving, magic feeling I used to have for programming is back! Yeah, baby.

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Hello – allow me to introduce… myself.

Shanti Braford here. (my blog) I’ve been behind the scenes here at Sprout It working on a top-secret Ruby on Rails project that should be our 2nd integrated application in the Sprout It suite of web-based hosted apps for small businesses.

But that’s all going to change soon (not the secret part, at least not yet), as I am getting involved in Mailroom development / bug fixes / enhancements in a much bigger way here shortly.

Scott Barron has been doing an incredible job on Mailroom. He’s been working with and contributing to the core Ruby on Rails framework since the its early days on the scene. Needless to say, I’ve certainly learned a thing or two from Scott and look forward to working with him more in the future.

Ok, back on topic—BlogPolls!

The idea. BTW – if anyone knows Michael Arrington, see if he will plug this idea on TechChrunch because a week later we could have five Web 2.0 startups building BlogPolls ™, one will even have raised 2M in Venture Capital already. And yes, that’s all very much a good thing! =)

BlogPolls ™ would:

• be a web hosted service (nothing to install, of course)
• have a predefined list of common questions to ask your blog audience
• allow you to easily customize your poll form
• email you a summary of the results and responses
• provide nice, pretty color-coded graphs of the collected data (duh)
• be full of ajaxy goodness
• provide an API (we can wait for version 2 on this one)

Thus BlogPolls ™ would allow you to:

• learn who your audience is—what their interests are, etc.
• provide demographic data to advertisers (ex: 80% of readers make $75k or more. w00t!)
• target your site content better and learn what they want to read about on your blog

So, any takers? If you build this, I can guarantee you at least one paying customer if the price is right.

Disclaimer: I have done 0 Google searches to actually see if, you know, maybe this already exists. That’s just how I roll.

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