When I started this blog almost a year ago, I really wasn’t sure what I’d be writing about. As it happened, it ended up being much more technical than I had envisioned, and focusing a great deal on building and deploying Ruby on Rails applications.

I haven’t written nearly as much as I would like about Rails, in part because this blog felt like not quite the right place for it—I want something with a richer information architecture.

In the past year, I’ve collected a huge list of links to useful blogs, valuable references, ebooks, mailing lists, conferences, and other resources. There’s a tremendous amount of information available on the web, and it’s hard to imagine learning all this technology without the web as a resource. But this information is widely scattered, and while a google search will sometimes lead you quickly to the best resource to answer a given question, often it takes quite a bit of sleuthing. Rails itself makes it relatively easy to build an application to organize and present all this information—a curious sort of virtuous circle.

In the past few months, I’ve been working with my colleague Chris Haupt on just such an application: BuildingWebApps.com. The BuildingWebApps.com main site is currently in a limited private beta, but you can visit the site now and sign up to receive an invitation when we’re ready to accept more beta users.

We’ve begun a BuildingWebApps Blog, which explains a little more about what we’re doing, and will chronicle the development of the site. If you’re interested in Ruby on Rails or web applications in general, please visit the new blog and sign up for its feed.