Learning Something New

Zen Habits has become one of my most looked forward to subscriptions lately. One of the most important things when reading a blog to me is that you either 1) learn something new or 2) have a call to action that hits close to home. Posts always come through with one of those, and usually two — calling for action and showing you how to do it. This month they launched an October Challenge where they put out the idea that if you do something consistently for 30 days it will become a habit. So what habit am I trying to train? I’d like to consistently work on web projects, rather than just doing short spells on them “when I have time”. We all know that you only have time for something when you make it, so if I can get myself into the habit of making just 30 minutes a day to work on some web project (anything), then a month down the line I’m hoping it’ll be enough to carry on. To start off, I’m working my way through the Agile Development with Rails , doing the examples using Rails 2.0 preview release and the Blueprint CSS Framework for layout. This is probably the set of resources I’ll be using for my next project, assuming things go well here. Either way I’ll certainly get a better handle on both, while having a book at my disposal to fall back on. Dreamhost has Rails and SVN hosting, so at least I’ll have a place to post it as things come along.