Things have jumped quite a bit in the last couple of years for me. Over two years ago now I launched Ruby Inside to promote my book "Beginning Ruby" published by Apress. Instead of just promoting the book, however, it has become the most popular Ruby weblog out there with over 16,000 subscribers! The power of open source audiences!

I have partnered up with someone else now to do a similar thing in the nascent iPhone development industry.. so welcome Mobile Orchard, a blog for iPhone and iPod Touch developers!

It seems I have moved out of development somewhat and more into publishing news and information for those who ARE developing.. and most of that is aimed at open source developers. So.. even if I'm not developing software, I'm trying to help the community. Long may it all last!

It's been a couple of years since I posted here.. I'm really glad Advogato didn't die during that phase several months ago, and vow to do a bit more here ;-)

Currently playing with Linus' 'git' (which is definitely proving how superior it is to Subversion) after being won over by this presentation. It runs on OS X pretty well, but I'm wondering whether to move to Linux full-time for development nowadays..

Not significant amounts of news. Feed Digest has become a real business, and I sold my Code Snippets app/site (first announced here on Advogato!) to DZone for a not insignificant five figure sum earlier this year.. who says you can't make money from open source? (downside: it's not open source anymore.. blame my license for that ;-))

I've become the latest addition to the Weblogs Inc., recently purchased by AOL, stable of bloggers. I'll be working on the OpenSource.weblogsinc.com weblog covering the open source beat, so if you have any leads, drop me a line. I start this week :-)

It's been a few months since I posted and.. wow, what a few months! One of my crazy ideas has turned into a proper business and gotten some funding. Am I the next dot com millionaire? Nah.. but it's great working with technology and not worrying too much about how I'm going to buy the next sack of groceries anyway. We're moving for further rounds soon..

In other news, my buddies at Globat have launched MillionDollarHelpPage.com, in order to raise $1 million for Katrina victims. It's based off of the MillionDollarHomePage.com idea that's been going around the net lately where a 21-year-old British kid has made $150,000 so far to pay for his university education. Now let's hope Globat can do it to make money for those in serious need :)

My latest Rails project launches.

After months of development (it'd have been longer if not for Rails!) GoDefy (Internet marketing products) launches! It's all in Ruby on Rails and while its product niche is small, it has a lot more features than something like Froogle, and better searching that sites like Shopping.com, etc. The code for it will never be open sourced, sadly, although it's definitely a testiment to what open source can do, and why I continue to donate a lot to the community.

Snippets marches on.

TextDrive, a Web hosting provider, is now using my open sourced Snippets system on TextSnippets.com.. a form of specialized knowledge base for users of their services. Brad Phelan has also launched a Snippets site for Matlab code.