Time: 6:30 — 8:00pm

Location:
1350 Timberlake Manor Pkwy
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Third floor — train­ing room (right off the elevator)

Featured Topics/Speakers for our March Meeting:

1. Gateway Ruby Conference dis­cus­sion (Amos)
2. Monthly Ruby Core Library Review — Each month we’ll dis­cuss another library from Ruby’s core libraries. This month is Pathname. Bring your favorite libraries to dis­cuss withe the group each month. (Jeff Barczewski — Pathname)
3. Forwardable (Gordon Theisfeld @gordonthiesfeld)
4. Cucumber (Craig)
5. ByteWorks Project review — Nathan Neff will update us on his time track­ing project with ByteWorks.

One of the great­est fea­tures of a Ruby user group is to be able to bounce ideas off each other and to share code and approaches to prob­lems. In-person col­lab­o­ra­tion with some of the best soft­ware crafts­men in the St. Louis area....priceless!

Meetings are inter­ac­tive and user dri­ven, topic length and details are dri­ven by inter­est and ques­tions of the group.

If you want to share your expe­ri­ence or present another topic let us know or come to the meet­ing. We’re always open to new top­ics of interest.

After the meet­ing, sev­eral of us usu­ally head to a local restau­rant for food and post-meeting socializing.

Due to the reg­u­lar meet­ing night falling on Valentine’s Day, we’ve decided to can­cel the meet­ing for February. (We talked about post­pon­ing the meet­ing by 1 week, but that’s Presidents’ Day, and many peo­ple will be out of town.)

So if you’ve got a sig­nif­i­cant other, please enjoy spend­ing some time with them. If you don’t have a sig­nif­i­cant other, con­sider spend­ing some time con­tribut­ing to an Open Source project that you like. ;)

We had our monthly meet­ing on Monday, January 10, 2011. During the meet­ing, we dis­cussed the pos­si­bil­ity of cre­at­ing a WordPress site to serve as our main web site, since Google Groups no longer allows edit­ing the front page of our group. So I’ve cre­ated the WordPress site, and we’re test­ing it out.

The idea is to write up a blog post with the details for each upcom­ing meet­ing. Then mem­bers can post com­ments before or after the meet­ing, dis­cussing what they want to see at the meet­ing, or post­ing follow-up info that was dis­cussed dur­ing the meeting.

We’ll also cre­ate a cou­ple sta­tic pages, includ­ing some info about our group, info about our meet­ing loca­tion, and a page with ideas for top­ics we could use for upcom­ing meetings.

Currently, Craig, Jeff, and Kent are main­tain­ing the site. We’ll adjust that as nec­es­sary, if oth­ers would like to help out.

So, a few questions:

1. Would the com­ments over­lap with dis­cus­sions on our Google Group too much?
2. Should we post a blog entry with upcom­ing meet­ing details, even if we haven’t set­tled on the pre­sen­ta­tion top­ics? I.e. allow dis­cus­sion in the com­ments, and update the blog entry per the sug­ges­tions in the comments?
3. What’s the best way to allow com­ments? Currently, com­ments are allowed from any­one, but the first com­ment by a given per­son has to be approved before it shows up. The other easy alter­na­tive is to require signups for com­menters, but I’d rather not require peo­ple to have to remem­ber another login and password.
4. Can any­one help cre­ate a decent look­ing WordPress theme, or adapt an exist­ing one? I’ve uploaded a ban­ner file from the tem­po­rary Google Sites page.
5. What else do we want the blog to do for us?

We’ve installed WordPress in order to test it out to use for the St. Louis Ruby Users Group as a blog. The idea is to post about upcom­ing meet­ings. We can also allow com­ments for the posts, so mem­bers can post links to info men­tioned dur­ing the meeting.