Applying Tutorial Methods to My Own Rails Projects

So even though I picked Agile Web Development with Rails back up the other day (after about 2 months away from it) I decided to start the entire book over again. I don't typically like doing this, but I felt my reasoning was sound. For one thing, going back through building the shopping cart application would make more sense to me now, since I'm thinking about how Rails applications work and not just making sure I'm following the tutorial correctly so I don't get errors. For another, I was pretty sure I could find some techniques I could apply to my personal projects. Lastly, the first time around I skipped all the optional coding at the end of every section and this time I'm going to do it. I'm more interested in learning new ideas than in making this one specific application work correctly.

On this last part I was correct. I just went through the beginning part, which walks me through generating a scaffold for the project, then some styling to spruce the code up a bit and I already found a couple of ideas I want to apply to Chorenivore.

This is something I need to be doing every time I'm doing a tutorial or looking at code. What can I do with this? How does this apply to my projects?

Something funny I noticed this morning: back when I was learning CSS, I had a hard time understanding what a class was. And now with Rails, it's something I don't even think about. I don't know if I've just seen it often enough that I get it now, or if Rails has so many other things that are more complex that it just doesn't register. Probably a mixture of both, I'm guessing!

I felt a bit lazier this week, because I feel like Chorenivore is about as done as it's going to be for now and I didn't feel like digging back into Agile Web Development with Rails. What do you guys do to stay motivated when you're between projects like this? Does that even happen to more experienced Rails developers?

Oh and one last thing. Eli emailed me asking what happened to my old blog. I didn't realize switching from rubymeltdown.blogspot.com to codeitlikeyoustoleit.blogspot.com would DESTROY all my followers, so I put another blog up on rubymeltdown.blogspot.com, redirecting people to this blog. That should take care of that problem!