what_i_am.upto(2010)

Note: This is a cross-posting from the new Ruby Toolbox blog. I won’t do these in the future. For all updates on The Ruby Toolbox, please subscribe to the news feed there!

Finally, here is the news post promised almost two weeks ago. In the last two weeks, a couple of updates have found their way to The Ruby Toolbox. Apart from various updates to the layout and other minor improvements, there are three major feature additions, which I will cover in a little more detail.

Projects and Categories listings

In the top navigation bar, you will now find links to listings for categories and projects. They also have some rather nice tooltips, so try and hover them

The super-ugly dropdown cateogry selector in the upper right has also been replaced by a fancier navigation which hopefully also addresses the increasing navigation issues that grew out of the old select tag with the boatload of categories that have been added since the Toolbox launched.

Project news

Thanks to the Technorati API, each project now has a listing of blog posts featuring information about it.

The search is done based upon links to the project’s Github repository, so all you people out there writing about something Ruby that is hosted on Github and featured here, please remember to link up the project repo from within your post!

Assuming your blog is being indexed by Technorati, your post should appear on the corresponding project’s category listing. Please let me know if there are issues with that!

The inclusion of project news from the blogosphere leads us straight to the next big addition:

Feeds

Plenty of people have been asking for them, and yes, they finally have arrived!

Apart from the obvious feed for this latest news blog, there are also feeds for recently added categories, recently added projects and, last but not least, a feed for the aforementioned blogosphere index, which will give you the latest blogposts about projects covered in The Ruby Toolbox.

I hope you will enjoy the new features. Please let me know what you would like to see in The Ruby Toolbox and of course you’re free to report any issues and projects currently missing!

So, after my return from Cairo and right before heading to Las Vegas for RailsConf tomorrow morning, I have put together a little website called The Ruby Toolbox.

The page is meant to give you information on what Ruby tool from GitHub you could use to do X, Y or Z. The tools are assorted in categories like “Testing Frameworks”, “State Machines”, “Markup Processors” and so on. The projects listed in each category have scores calculated from their respective GitHub repositories’ watcher and fork counts, so you can get an idea which project is the most popular in the dev community.

I hope this will be of use to people i.e. wondering which test framework they should choose from the plethora of options or to find out about alternatives to currently used tools and their popularity.

So, head over to ruby-toolbox.com and drop me a line whether you like it, tweet me @thedeadserious or tell me right at RailsConf in Vegas!

If you want a (your?) project or another category added, please also drop me a line because the categories and projects on the page only serve as a starting point. This will hopefully grow in time!