Read about it on GreenValhalla.

Today, Mary and I went to something called the Silicon Valley Code Camp. It’s a free, two day conference “by and for the developer community.” It’s basically a bunch of sessions about various aspects of software development, from Microsoft’s .NET to Google’s KML. There were multiple, concurrent sessions through the weekend, and a free lunch was provided by Microsoft. The sessions were presented by developers with varying experience in development and presentation skills. Mary and I only attended 2 sessions.

The first session was “Programming for Children” presented by Edward Cherlin. The session was supposed to introduce us to the XO Laptop from One Laptop Per Child. The XO is targeted to “provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.” You can read more about the XO on the OLPC website and the OLPC wiki. You can donate an XO and get one for yourself by clicking on the “give 1 get 1″ logo. There are other ways to contribute as well.

From the session description, we expected to get the answers to the following questions:

• What kind of content is needed, and what is the process for creating it?
• What is the process for Sugarizing existing software?
• How will the children adapt software to their needs, and learn to write more?

Unfortunately, the presenter was not very focused. He kept getting easily sidetracked and it didn’t help that a few people in the audience would ask questions that would get him further off topic. About all we did learn is that Edward Cherlin is a well intentioned but very odd individual. I suppose we did get some background on the OLPC project, but most of that is on the wiki. On the bright side, we did have an opportunity to touch and feel an XO laptop in person. There’s a picture of Mary with the XO on on the left.

The second session was “Design Patterns - What They Are and Why You Should Care” by Fletcher Johnson. This was a much better presentation than the first one. In fact, the presenter even taught at San Jose State University for a time, so he is a well seasoned lecturer. According to Wikipedia, a design pattern is “a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design.” It’s a way to describe and classify a solution to common problems. One example given was imagine you are designing a 2 story building and you needed to figure out how people will got from one floor to the next. You could use stairs, escalator, elevator, etc. These are design patterns. The session focused on design patters as they pertain to object-oriented programming (OOP) where design patters typically show the relationships between classes or objects without specifying the final class or object. The lecture was well done, but I don’t have a lot of experience with OOP, so most of it was lost on me.

Last week Ron and I decided that we should include an RSS feed on dishAdish. The idea was to show all the latest comments on dishes and restaurants for the site. Our hope is that by including the feed as a site map on Google Webmaster Tools, it will help our latest changes get indexed quicker. The problem was, neither of us knew anything about RSS feeds, let alone how to implement it within our Ruby on Rail web environment.

I started out, as usual, by doing some quick searches on Google. I found a few references to various Ruby on Rails packages to implement feed and feed readers, but they all seemend a bit complicated for what we wanted. Then I ran across a very simple solution in a post from Paul Sturgess Ruby on Rails Snippets called Creating an RSS feed in Ruby on Rails. This was just what I wanted. By adding 5 lines of code to my controller and creating a very simple RXML view, I was able to easily create The Latest Dish at dishAdish. Further, by adding a simple <link/> directive to the site template, this feed can be automatically discovered by browsers.

Ruby on Rails is pretty cool stuff…

I’ve migrated all my blogs to WordPress. I already had my Green Valhalla blog running using WordPress, now I’ve converted the others. Setting up WordPress is pretty easy, as is importing Blogger based blogs. There are still a lot of plugins I want to add to this blog set up, but first I need to set up the basics. Sorry if some of the old links don’t work since I stopped my old Blogger blogs.

I’ve been working on a pseudo-web 2.0 page for a while with a friend of mine called dishAdish. The web site is a food review site focused on dish level reviews rather than just restaurant reviews. In any case, we developed the page from scratch using Ruby on Rails. It has been up for a while now and we’re slowly starting to get more users, but it’s a slow process. It seems like a lot of users come in from searches for misspelled food items. We seem to have reasonably high page ranking for misspelled words.

To increase our user base, we’re starting to focus on various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. It seems like the leading candidate is to get more incoming links to your site from other highly ranked pages. I’m not really sure how to go about doing this. Another area we need to improve is meta tags. At the moment we don’t even use them, so we should be able to improve this pretty quickly.

We have a little widget that allows users to display the top dishes for a particular key word. We call it the Best Dishes widget. At some point I’d like to turn this into a widget which can be uses on other sites so people can take polls for, say, the best burrito. If we could enable people to add these to their blogs or MySpace page or something, that would definitely drive up links to our site.