Up and Running

Posted 02 April 2009

Blogs are the archetypal Ruby on Rails web app. Remember that DHH video (the one with “whoops” all through it)? That was a blog he was making.

Since learning Rails I’ve come to love it, and I’m hoping to contribute back to the community at least a little bit. And to do that, you pretty much need to have a blog. So here’s mine. I don’t intend to post much, but I have a couple of plug-ins I want to release sometime this year, so I’ll at least need it for that.

I wrote the over a week and bit in March. It’s classic Rails: pagination; article and comment feeds; pretty, RESTful URLs; god-awful ruby-pun title. Shameless self-promotion via sidebar links. And check out the awesome page design and styling! (That’s sarcasm – did you notice? Web design: not my strong point.)

So a quick run-down of the site:

  • Haml for views (try it and never go back!);
  • CodeRay for syntax highlighting;
  • Textile via RedCloth for article markup;
  • a plugin of my own design for pagination (if I ever write that many articles…);
  • Vlad for deployment to a Linode VPS running Passenger (woo Passenger); and
  • (of course) Rails 2.3.

Page-cached to the gills, as my server also runs my main production site (things.toswap.com.au) and I don’t want to hog its resources.

Code for this site is on my GitHub account; fork away if you want to use it. (Better, just write your own!) It’s actually the second Rails site I wrote in March. The other is my personal photography gallery, moved over from Blogger—check it out.

Now I’ll go quiet for a couple months—off to Victoria and Tasmania for an extended bushwalking & photography trip. Should be good.

Feed-icon-14x14 Comments

  • Matthew Hollingworth
    (04 April 2009 at 10:39 AM) writes:

    Readers can add comments here. Markup any code block with <code:ruby> and a corresponding close tag. (Any language supported by CodeRay can be specified.) You can also mark up inline code with these tags. It looks OK:

    def self.included(base)
  base.class_eval do
    alias_method_chain :resources, :paged
  end
end

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