I think that one of the key resources for getting better at Ruby and Rails is through blogs. And the only way to stay up to date on a bunch of blogs is to use a feed reader. To get everyone started, I’ve customized and annotated an OPML file (standard format for a list of feeds) that contains the best Ruby and Rails blogs that I know about. The comments that I added to the file should give you a rough idea of what each blog is about, and who it’s written by. I also included the feeds for this forum and for our subversion repository. Here’s the OPML file:

http://pastie.caboo.se/90025

To subscribe to those blogs all at once, save the file as an XML file, and then import it into your feed reader.

If you don’t have a feed reader, I recommend Google Reader. Sign up for an account, then click on “Settings” in the upper right-hand corner, then click on “Import/Export”. From there it will let you import the XML/OPML file, and it will subscribe you to these blogs, so that you can read them all in one place and stay up to date.

I have two recommendations for setting up google reader: 1) set it so that it only shows unread items (click the “unread” link above your list of subscriptions in the reader), and 2) turn off the feature that automatically marks items as read once you scroll past them (under settings => preferences). This gives you a lot more control for sifting through all the posts that come in—you’ll only see posts that you haven’t read yet, and you can purposefully go through each post, and mark it read.

The best way to handle all the content is to work your way through all of your unread content each day, essentially cleaning out the reader. If you see something that you really want to read carefully later, mark it with a star, then mark it read. Then you can revisit your starred items at a later date.

There’s a lot of content there, and I certainly don’t promise that every post is going to be worth reading. Don’t be afraid to just skip articles that aren’t all that interesting to you. Just be ruthless and mark them read. You can’t read everything (at least I can’t), and if you start to let things pile up too much, then the uninteresting stuff starts to get in the way of finding the real gems. You’ll also start to figure out which blogs you can unsubscribe from, when you realize that you haven’t actually read any posts there in a long time.

Let me know if you have any questions or trouble. And post any other blogs that you find that we should be reading!

Recently, a subreddit was created specifically for ruby: http://ruby.reddit.com . It should be a good source of information.

Hello!

I have been spending quite some time now searching the ruby universe and I’d like to share these new ones I just found out;
http://rubyflow.com and http://whatsupinruby.com

Best.
alain