Learning Scala and Lift and blog background

Several months ago I read the awesome book Seven Programming Languages In Seven Weeks, and knew I wanted to learn some more about Scala.  Most of the projects I work on are low volume and wouldn't necessarily benefit a whole lot from using Scala, so I couldn't motivate myself to learn a whole new language that I might not even use.  Then I read about the Lift framework, and knew I wanted to learn both and create something real with them, regardless of what the projects I do at work are.

I've read through Programming Scala, another great book published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf, and feel that I can really develop some good Scala applications.  I've just now started reading Lift In Action to learn about Lift.  Since the community around Lift is still pretty small, and there are a lot of rapidly moving pieces with Lift, I wanted to start blogging about using Scala and Lift.  My main goal here will be to post helpful info that will save others some time.

So some background on me.  I've been doing software development for over 9 years, with the past 5 years of that being web application development.  I've done mostly Ruby on Rails and some PHP for those 5 years.  While I do still like Ruby on Rails, I think it's time for me to learn another new language that overcomes some of the down sides of Ruby and Rails.  I was an early adopter of Rails (started using it in 2006, at version 1.1), and I loved programming in something new and revolutionary.  I have a feeling Scala and Lift will play this role in the next few years.  Soon I'm going to build a side project with Scala and Lift, and I'm hoping I can incorporate it in to projects at my job.