Working on Loudmouth

Yesterday I finished up my first fully functional Ruby program: a chat bot! Beginning Ruby likes to call its bot Fred, but I named mine Loudmouth.

So now all I need to do is get Loudmouth up and running on the web. I started to dig into getting cgi scripts to run on my web server, but decided to leave it for tomorrow evening. Once again, I find myself learning non-Ruby stuff in order to work with Ruby. This kind of thing would have seriously intimidated me before I got into Ruby, but I've gotten a lot more comfortable working on back-end stuff.

I haven't been blogging as much, but I haven't been slacking on Ruby. (Not much, anyway!) I've been busy coding and haven't felt like I had much to say about what I was working on. Still, I need to get back into being more diligent with this blog. Writing about what I've just done really helps me retain the information.

The next chapter in Beginning Ruby will introduce me to Ruby on Rails, which is what my friend Eli suggested I look into next. This book has been such a great resource. I downloaded the source files for each chapter and they've helped tremendously, especially as I've gotten into these longer programs. Now it's easier to find out whether I forgot to close a statement or didn't put something in quotes.