I’m going to Railsconf in a few days. I’ve been spending much of my free time and, recently, a good bit of my professional time working with Rails. In preparing for the conference, I’ve been doing a ton of reading and a good bit of rails hacking.

I’ve been mostly silent on here for the last few weeks. This is partially because I’ve been so bummed about being vandalized and partially because I’ve been spending much of my would-be blogging time on building my own blog engine. Sure, WordPress is good enough for what I need, but it’s such a big target for automated hacking. Also, I’m not really learning much by using an out of the box application. I want this site to be a place where I can try things out.

It only took me one night to re-build the presentation engine, custom theme and all, with rails. It’s taking me considerably longer to get things like the MetaWeblog API, Akismet, and various other essential components I hadn’t considered complete. Also, there are some static urls that I cannot break such as the links to my very popular Scrollbox.js library and a few other things, which is where most of my traffic comes from. If I were just creating a new site, I’d be able to launch it today, but since I have so many features I have to keep consistent with the old version, it’s going to take a little while longer.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up in this post is that it’s my project for Railsconf weekend. I hope to get it finished and insert as many bells and whistles as possible while I’m away.

There are a lot of posts out there about using Rake for testing your app. What about testing your rake tasks? You gotta test those too, right?

Here’s a quick rails helper for using sIFR within Rails: http://pastie.textmate.org/192895.