One of my hobbies is web development, which was actually my foot into the door of technology as a career. Last night I attented the Manchester/Hartford Area Web Devs/Innovators. Here are some random thoughts and links to follow up on things discussed during the meetup.

I no longer do web development for clients on the side but I used www.freshbooks.com to handle customer invoicing in the past. Actually, I do have one client left that I bill through there. It allows me to setup recurring invoice profiles with reminders and makes the process pretty painless for both me and the client. It’s easy and free to start with. Worth a try.

For learning Ruby on Rails (RoR), go to http://www.herokugarden.com and set up a free account. It is so easy it’s mind-blowing. After years of PHP, ColdFusion, Perl, Classic ASP, VB.NET and C# — and different frameworks for each language — I can see why people are enamored of both Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework. I briefly tried Python/Django which is nice but RoR is the perfect fit for how I work. And once you get it, it is very gratifying to work with. I’ll continue to use PHP for my WordPress sites and my static content sites. The hosting is cheap and PHP makes it easy to do simple things with. For anything more complicated, I’ll use RoR.

The Ruby lang reference is http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib. For the Rails API, refer to http://api.rubyonrails.org. You can find applications to download and study at http://www.github.com, http://www.railskits.com and http://www.opensourcerails.com (among others). To test regular expressions which are always tricky, try http://www.rubyxp.com and http://www.rubular.com.

On the business, marketing front I have found Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords very useful in learning how to properly organize and run Google AdWords campaigns. His writing is simple and straightforward and he gives you a very good structure to keep things organized, to test and to fine tune to get the most out of your campaigns. I also use http://www.icontact.com to handle autoresponder duties.

(BTW: I’m sure somebody business-savvy will mention that I should use affiliate links for some of the things recommended above. Maybe I’ll do that down the road. I’m not sure how I feel yet promoting things from my personal site.)

As far as sites I currently run, I have a few small content sites but http://www.veryquotable.com is the main thing I tinker with for fun. I wrote it in ColdFusion a few years ago with big plans for it. But I always found working with CF to be pretty clunky and I never got around to rolling out new features. I started to rewrite it in PHP5/CodeIgniter but it was just as slow and clunky as working with CF so I shelved it. A week later I found Heroku Garden and it took my only a few hours one lonesome night in a hotel room to port most of the site. I’m more than 90% done with the port, which I plan to deploy on Heroku in the next few weeks (once I learn how to use Git). Once that’s finished I feel confident I can start rolling out new features.