About a week ago, I announced that I want to continue my Ruby Mendicant experiment on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I now have 50 subscribers backing me for a total of $544/mo before paypal fees. That puts me 20-25% of the way to a livable revenue stream within the first week of this experiment, which isn't a bad start.

One of the things I promised my backers is that I'd do a weekly dump of what I've been working on, and so here's the first one. Enjoy!

• I started refactoring bookie (my Ebook generation library) a bit so that it can eventually become something suitable for general use and not just a hack for my own needs. In particular, I started fleshing out rudimentary chapter support, currently just setting up headers now but will soon have proper native outline support for ePUB, PDF, and MOBI. The current capabilities of bookie can be seen in this sample PDF output. While they're a modest start, I think they show some promise. NOTE: I need some Kindle and iPad testers for the ePUB and MOBI support, especially could use some help with iPad because I don't own one. If you don't mind loading up some sample files from time to time and giving me feedback, please let me know.

• I did some work on the introduction for my book about the Ruby object system. This book will eventually be both free as in beer (via a sliding scale payment with a free option) and free as in freedom (via the creative commons sharealike and attribution license), but right now is only accessible through private beta books program. Still, I should have a publicly available sample chapter soon. This book uses bookie for eBook generation, which should push bookie along as I continue writing.

• I converted Practicing Ruby Issue #11 from its original format and released it on the Practicing Ruby blog, completing the four part series on modules.

• Met with @Jordan_Byron to discuss some upcoming changes to the way code reviews are requested in RbMU's university-web application. In the near future, all students and mentors in a course will have an easy place to find all pending review requests for any given project. Will post screenshots of this system once we get it built.

• Worked with Brandon Hays (@tehviking) to get preparations underway for releasing the next batch of PuzzleNode problems. These will be a mixture of student created problems and problems I've written myself, to be released publicly on May 15th as part of the next Ruby Mendicant University admissions call. These will go into internal testing within our alumni network by Monday 5/9, so we will hopefully have several people solve each problem before we roll them publicly, avoiding the mess that we made when we released our first batch untested.

• Reviewed individual project proposals for the 15 students that will be participating in the May 2011 RbMU core skills session, helping students revise their proposals as necessary. As usual, it's an exciting mix of ideas, ranging from game engines to personal productivity tools to neural networks. I don't like to talk too much about student projects before they've actually completed their session, but needless to say, I'm very excited about the things our students will be working on, and you'll be able to see all their progress as open source projects on github three weeks from now.

• Made a video response to Brandon's post about why he still doesn't contribute to open source software, sharing my experiences both as a free software project maintainer and as someone who mentors beginner and intermediate software developers. You can find this talk on YouTube, it's on the long side at just under 50 minutes, but hopefully useful to anyone out there who has fears or reservations about participating in open source. Also, could be useful to maintainers who want to make their projects more friendly to new contributors. This was in part inspired by a talk that Erik Michaels-Ober (@sferik) gave at Red Dirt RubyConf, but only coincidentally, since it's based on my own opinions and experiences that happen to overlap heavily with his outlook on things.
  

I probably did other things within the last week or so, but these are the things that haven't yet slipped my mind. If my progress so far has convinced you that it's worth contributing $4, $8, $16, or $32 a month to help me keep working full time on community projects like these, please do subscribe below. Whether or not you're a subscriber, if you find my story interesting, I'd appreciate if you share a link back to this post on twitter or wherever else it might reach people who would appreciate it.

Catch you again next week! I will get a mailing list and IRC channel set up for subscribers soon, but for now, if you have questions or thoughts to share, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.