17:09 - The past month has been unproductive. Or rather, it’s felt unproductive. Like, all sound and fury signifying nothing.

And yet…

I volunteered for a leadership position with ChickTech newly formed Austin chapter. Check out the website for a chapter near you if you’re looking for a way to give back this year (and if you’re in the Austin area, definitely contact me for more information!)

Looking back over my blog posts it seems I have also successfully completed the Rails Tutorial and now have it on my plate to go back through with a fine tooth comb.

I also have a rather ambitious Portfolio plan.

So today I’ll record my first little victory: in my quest to finish the Engineering SaaS, I stumbled upon my first “put it all together” project:

Project 4.9 Write and deploy a rails app that scrapes some information from a web page using Nokogiri’s XPath features, and turns it into an RSS feed using Builder. Verify that you can subscribe to the RSS feed in your browser or RSS news reader.

This satisfies a quest of mine: start creating sketch applications without much guidance. My target for this project is, actually, this blog, despite the fact that Jekyll already comes with a robust RSS feed generator. Ultimately I’d like to adapt the application so that it queries sites like Congress.gov (since we’re still waiting on gov’t API’s), or, more frivolously, craigslist, updating when new relevant entries are created.

Today’s victory was developing the first taste of logic using just Nokogiri and Builder on the command line. You can see this project on ashleymichal’s GitHub.

But tonight, STAR WARS!