In the United States, elections are coming up next week. Radical Designs, a Rails development shop in San Francisco, has put together a site (using Rails) to let voters build, share, and view voter guides: TheBallot.org. Ballots in US elections can be long and complicated, so many groups make voter guides to help sort through the issues. If you’re curious, PodTech did a videolog interview about the building of TheBallot.org.

RailsDay finally got around to announcing the winners. Congratulations to them all. Especially Amy Hoy and Bryan Wood, who with Freckle won the Best Overall. Also of interest is jaded Pixel Awesome Ninja Game that won Most Creative.

Evan Weaver has a more in-depth rundown of all the winners.

Ruby on Rails Camp is an event for up to 120 people who can make it out to the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose and are willing to cough up $25 for the entry. Their pitch is:

Ruby on Rails Camp will be a gathering of enthusiasts who want to share and learn more about Ruby on Rails (RoR) in an open environment. It will be an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.

The focus is the somewhat odd question “Is Ruby on Rails Ready for Business?”, but that shouldn’t stop you from going if you’re in the area.

Regional Rails conferences are popping up all over the place. On November 17th, Paris on Rails will go down. It looks like it’ll be a great show for all French speaking people out there. And they got some nice sponsors lined up, such as IBM and Telecom Italia. Way to go.

If you want to sign up, the fee is 60 euro.

There are only 216 days until RailsConf 2007! The 2nd annual International Rails Conference will be in Portland, Oregon on May 17-20, 2007. Don’t worry, it’s going to be a few months before tickets go on sale (and sell out instantly). But if you’re thinking about submitting a proposal to speak at RailsConf, the time for that is fast approaching. Go to the conference website to answer the call for proposals - the deadline for submissions is November 27, 2006.

If you’re not planning a talk, you might want to go to the conference wiki and leave your ideas for what you’d like to see in the program.

Damien Merenne has created a swank plugin for page cache testing. Whether caching has happened or they’ve been expired. Quite useful for testing sweeper logic, which, like any caching techniques, are often susceptible to subtle invalidation bugs. Hopefully Merenne will continue work on his plugin and extend it to deal with action and fragment caching too. That’d put it on the fast track for core inclusion.

Mike Naberezny has a brief tutorial on how to make your own custom rescue screens for development mode when using Rails Edge. This way you can tailor the look of the rescue screens to your current application and display application specific rescue data. Neato.

Stefan Kaes from RailsExpress has recently released a Rails plugin that greatly reduces the time Rails spends for rendering ERb templates. He’s now looking for help to get the code out of beta.

The basic idea behind the plugin is to improve rendering speed by partially evaluating the code produced by ERb at template compile time. This is especially helpful for pages that contain many calls to helpers that make use of Rails’ route generation, because most routes can be resolved at template compile time.

Stefan has reported some data on the speedups obtainable which looks very promising.

He has set up Trac for you to submit bug reports, feature requests and patches.

David Pettifer has created a compact Capistrano cheat sheet in PDF format. It summarizes helper methods, pre-defined variables, standard tasks, capfile syntax, standard release directory structure, and more. So go ahead, download it!

(For those arriving late to the party, Capistrano is a utility for executing commands in parallel on multiple remote hosts. You can read all about it in the Capistrano manual.)

rails-konferenz.de is a one-day German Rails conference taking place at the NH Hotel in Frankfurt am Main on November 3rd. They have sessions on localization, testing, backgroundrb, and more.

If you speak German and have Frankfurt within reach, you should check it out.