Hey folks. We’ve been toiling hard in the fiery pit — I’m the master, he’s the blaster! — to bring you the latest Veer Ideas release. Here’s the rundown.

Groups
Build communities and get involved. Share ideas, pick sides, and get fresh perspectives. You can find them here. Don’t be chicken, get with the clickin’.

Jobs
Projects and jobs for designers and developers. Search your city or the one next door. A great resource, brought to you in cooperation with Mr. Cameron Moll and Authentic Jobs.

Your Comments
Do you love hearing yourself speak? Who doesn’t? Now you can keep a tab on all the posts and portfolios that you or your contacts have commented on. Look for the shiny new links on the Skinny, Fat, Portfolios, and member pages.

Time-zone Detection
It’s 4:00 am … but where? Now you’ll always see dates and times accurate to your location, even if you live in Saskatchewan.

HTML Support
For the finicky fastidious formatter, we’ve added even more HTML support to description and comment fields.

Self-validation
Were our atom feeds looking a bit weird? Not anymore.

Tiny, But Tasty
Comprehensive microformats have been added to member profiles and groups. Scrape it up like your momma’s cookie dough.

Top it all off with a bunch of performance improvements and tweaks and there you have it. Enjoy!

xo

As some of you know, we the Veer Worker Gnomes decided last year to adopt Ruby on Rails for the development of the new and awesome Ideas section. It’s been a blast. Rails isn’t perfect, but I haven’t had this much fun nerding in a long time, and its allowed us to push out snazzy new features way faster that we've ever been able to before.

Fellow VWG, Mark Bauer, and I headed down to Portland last week to check out the happenings at RailsConf 2008. All in all, a good show. Four days of intensive sessions, new ideas, product announcements (woo Rails 2.1!), shmoozing, and frolicking. Thanks to everyone for their involvement, cheers to those we managed to meet up with, and loving kudos to Portland for being such an awesome city.

Learn more about RailsConf here and RoR here.

Aficionados of rust and ruin will get a kick out of this photographic gallery of dead ships lingering on the edge of Staten Island, New York. If you have any Lustmord or Einstürzende Neubauten records collecting dust in the closet, now would be the time to bring them out.

An archive of tasty (and oh so stylish) Commodore ads, brochures, and even TV spots can be found at The Commodore Billboard. The '80s never looked so good.

Road trip through Chernobyl. A fascinating pictorial.