@TheKeyboard Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

My side project is Rallyhat, an idea I’ve had for some time now. Basically, it’s a digital photo scavenger hunt with a nice social networking twist. I have a teaser page up right now where you can submit your email address to be notified of when a beta is ready to be used.

It’s built using Ruby on Rails. Why Rails? Well, aside from all my soul-searching about what to use, there is a simple reason: I could build it in PHP quite easily, but where’s the challenge in that? All my side projects teach me something and I’m confident I’ll come out of this as a kick-ass Rails developer, along with learning some techniques I can apply to my PHP programming.

Please visit the site, sign up to be notified of the availability of a beta release and let me know any comments you might have.

After much digging around on the net, I finally got rallyhat under version control AND using Capistrano. For the uninitiated, Capistrano is a tool for deploying your application. It’s command-line driven, has hooks in it for version control (I keep my code in a Subversion repository, and has all sorts of cool little features to it.

I found a great tutorial on using Capistrano on media temple and then found another link that showed some tips for dealing with password prompts and such.

So now when I do my development work on my laptop, when I’m happy with the code I can push it up onto the live site with a series of commands. It even allows me to roll stuff back if I have to. I wish there was a tool this great written in PHP, but luckily you can use it with PHP or any other web-based scripting language. All Capistrano cares about is that your code is located in the right place. One of these days I’ll put together the deployment script for pushing a PHP app as proof of concept.

Well, it’s not much to look at it but I finally got rallyhat.com moved over to my new host, so I can get to work on it. My man Biz is going to be helping me with graphics and the look and feel, in exchange for me teaching him some more programming. He’s a really good sysadmin (all around Mac wizard) but he wants to get his programming skills past (to quote him) “stealing other people’s stuff and hacking on it until it sort of works.” Hey, that’s how all of us start, but most of us get to the point where we can create our own stuff from scratch.