This is the first blog post I’ve put up here in nearly three months. Considering that I’ve posted at least once a month since May ‘07, that’s some sort of record. Since I last posted, a lot has happened. In no particular order…

I bought a real bicycle. I blame it for my lack of blog posts and increased fitness levels. I am a nerd, goddammit. I’ve been using to explore Sydney and heckle pedestrians more now that I am not spending weekends writing all the time. In similar news, I’ve lived in Sydney for a year and a half and today was the first day I went to Wentworth Falls. A++, would hike again.

Then there was all this:

Rails 3.1 was released on schedule. Amazing work by amazing dudes. This means that…

I have finished writing Rails 3 in Action and there will be dead trees copies at StrangeLoop conference in St Louis, where I will be in attendance and signing it. (God, that sounds so pretentious.) I honestly don’t think I’ve heard someone say “this is total bollocks” (or something along those lines), but perhaps I am selective of hearing.

You will get your dead-tree copies also when Manning can ship them out. I don’t have any information on these dates at the moment. Updates to the PDF coming shortly, after the typesetters have performed their magic.

I helped out with the now-fantastic Official Asset Pipeline guide that explains the ins-and-outs of the Asset Pipeline with Rails 3.1. Thanks to Mohammad Typaldos, Richard Hulse, and the other people who have worked on it since we first published it on this site.

I begun work on a documentation tool called “Muse”, the idea and name I ‘borrowed’ from my co-author, Yehuda Katz and this lets me do things like an internals guide to Sprockets. Muse parses the source file for this guide, validates that it contains correct code examples and then renders it into lovely Markdown.

Ideally, I would like this to work with the Rails guides too eventually, so we could test that its content is still relevant.

Now that the book is done, I will be focussing my efforts on completing that internals guide whenever I find myself with too much spare time and don’t feel like going for a ride or hiking in the mountains.