My friend Alex and I have launched an early version of a project we’ve been working on called Idea Bacon. It is a website built using Ruby on Rails and hosted on AWS. The purpose of the website is to allow people to share ideas for new products and services that they may have in the back of their mind. A secondary purpose for the website is as a vehicle that allows us to learn new skills.

There are many project website I have worked on that just end up sitting on my hard drive and never see the light of day. Idea Bacon is one of the first Rails based websites that I have pushed out into the world for others to see and use. In doing so I have learned a bit about Capistrano, which I used for deployment.

I have also been learning lessons that come when people start to use what you’ve built. Suddenly the application contains real data that people expect will be there when they return. In development it has been common for me to take the eraser to sections I didn’t really like. This is still possible, but requires more thought on how to execute the changes.

So far the project has been really fun and educational. I expect to complete and publish some updates in the weeks to follow. Until then please check out what we’ve done and give us some feedback.

I have decided to leave Wordpress behind for now. My blogging needs are small and I’m no longer interested in the maintenance that Wordpress requires. Instead, I have moved my whole website to Octopress. It is a static site builder that extends the functionalty of Jekyll.

The pages are written in Markdown and then converted to static HTML files. This post is the jumping off point. Next I will put some content on the other pages and change the layout a bit. Maybe I will even add Disqus commenting.

Since I am always interested in shiny new web development ideas I plan using this website as a bit of laboratory for new ideas and projects. Or to at least show off the things I am working on. Lately I’ve been having some fun extending my Javascript knowledge and learning Backbone.js.

A project currently in the works will help me, and perhaps others, learn which of their DVDs can be watching through a streaming service. Of course this isn’t an original idea. Can I Stream.it? already does this quite well. Rather than write another blogging app or todo list I thought this might be a good way to learn Backbone, Node.js and working with API calls.