Pandora Squared - Web and Business Architects, Consultants, Social Media Marketing, Software and Blogging hope not hype

Its a good sign for the maturity of a product to see its adoption in the business world. Over the last few weeks some very good Rails only business hosting companies have appeared. Offering VPS or dedicated systems, they bring to the market simple deployment and maintenance with the now semi standard Capistrano, Lighttpd and MySQL. All of this is possible with your own dedicated server (as we have done here at Pandora Squared) but the additional experience and support of a dedicated host is always comforting.

With each company offering their own Capistrano recipes, it means that a project can be deployed remotely in only a few minutes.

Rails Machine I’m sure will be very interesting to the business crowd as it is offering service contracts and support alongside its hosting.

It might be time to investigate further and add some network redundancy to our rails sites.

We have added sexy tag clouds to the blogs for our engine. The tag cloud appears for all tags for all published and public blog entries, but also for individual users when managing their own blog articles.

A nice piece of code explaining how it all comes together here . All made possible by the sexy acts_as_taggable pluggin.

Example

Nice to see that IBM is appreciating the Ruby on Rails special sauce, they have just published an article covering some of the important aspects of Rails (and of course relate it all back to how to improve Java).

with the recently concluded web 2.0 training workshop, our company had to catch up on its internal operations and meet deadlines. we’ve had enough time to bond… not just as a business team but as a family… in fact, i think im still hungover from the team building activities we’ve had… :) whew!

but seriously, integrating human element into our virtual office and the relationship we have developed now is what enables our company to move ahead and getting things done, rather than just yakking on and on about web 2.0. so as nike would say it, JUST DO IT. there’s just too many yakkers out there. it’s time somebody DO something and bring forward the essence of web 2.0. and that is

ENABLING, EMPOWERING AND ENRICHING LIVES.

and for now, that mission has also started here in the philippines. we started with the web 2.0 training workshop.

the 2nd iBlog summit and davao city councilor peter lavina’s participatory governance shows that filipinos are starting to acknowledge the powers of blogging. several filipinos have also made social communities like luis buenaventura of www.gibbity.com, www.oks.ph, www.highfiber.org, and www.filmcrowd.com, jason banico’s funchain and if there’s somebody i missed please feel free to add to this…

all these simply shows the filipinos’ ability in adapting new technologies and if harnessed to its full potentials, the philippines, does indeed, have a shot at becoming the center for software development and training hub in asia.

one of the gaps identified that needs to be addressed to is the lack of capability building opportunities for our local IT people. and conducting this training provided an insight as to what our developers really need.

enablement.

through

education.

a little push will go a long way. after three days of interaction, i realized by enabling our local IT guys, the philippines will not only emerge as asia’s IT hub for software and training development but the world as well. these guys that attended the training have fantastic ideas that if nurtured, will scare the hell out of those nerds and so-called innovators at san francisco and silicon valley. and we will make sure the nurturing process continues.

after the training was the pinoy web 2.0 chikahan. and we met some guys who, until the chikahan, we have been communicating with online. guys that are quitely making their own mark in the industry. and talking to them in person reinforced what i realized at the training.

and our hope for the philippines emerging as a leader in IT development is not just a dream. it is becoming true. and this is just a start.

The last day of Manila Web2.0 Training focuses on ruby on rails and hands-on workshop to create some simple applications.

The webcam is live:

The second day of Manila Web2.0 Training begins with a comprehensive overview of Web2.0, social software and communities.

The webcam is live:

We have a webcam covering the training event in Manila for those who can’t make it. It will be online between the hours of 8:30am and 6pm Manila Time until Wednesday.

Update: Webcam moved to a later post

Wouldn’t that be cool news…? Well not quite yet but its interesting to see the the waves have already been made, lets ride em. From fellow evangalist Frank Arr at Microsoft

Ruby.NET under development downunder at QUT

I was catching up on my reading today and spotted the following post from Serial Imagine Cup Participant, Doug Stockwell:

Ruby.NET has a web site, and a name?

First mentioned on the Gardens Point Parser Generator site some time ago and largely unnoticed by the internet in general, Ruby.NET now has it’s own page giving a bit more info, even an expected release schedule.

This has already started a few waves.

The main aim of the project is to support 100% of Ruby language semantics, but as I have posted about in the past this is not an easy problem.

Great to see that there are more developers working with Rails over here in Australia. Via an article on Computerworld (and the rails blog) comes School Seek, a portal for locating Schools.

After a successful Ruby on Rails workshop at WebDU, I’m looking forward to seeing all the talent around here producing some great sites. Anyone else out there in Australia doing exciting work?

Time is running out for the Sydney Ruby on Rails Workshop

Run in association with the rails guru Tim from Aviditybytes, the half-day workshop will introduce you to new web development tools and techniques which will help you write web application faster, with more enjoyment and oozing with best practices.

If you’re a business looking at investigating these new tools, or if you’re a freelancer wanting to expand your skills, you’ll get weeks worth of self-learning packed into this half-day.

After a thorough introduction to the Ruby language we’ll dive head first into creating your first Rails application: Railshop.

There’s only 6 days left and seats are filling fast so phone Vivianne at Daemon on 02 9380 4162 or email to secure your spot.

Technorati Tags: Ruby on Rails, WebDu, AvidityBytes, Pandora Squared