12.25.07

Just what the world doesn’t need … another blog engine.

Posted in Ruby, blog, rails at 9:36 pm by Robert Horvick

Nuby on Rails recently asserted that “every beginning Rails developer should write their own blog software. It’s a great learning experience and you can try things that aren’t possible with just an app running on localhost.”

I can buy into this.  It’s the canonical Rails sample app.  I’m new to Ruby and Rails.  Maybe I should do this.  And I don’t mean a little toy that I do in 15 minutes and then throw away.  I mean the blogging platform I use for my primary blog.

So I sat down and tried to list out what I would want my blog to look like …

1. I don’t want to spend time writing code for a text editor to write blog posts
2. I want people to be able to subscribe to my content
3. I want caching (not that I plan to get dugg - but it’s good learning)
4. I want to be able to easily customize the look/feel
5. I want to support tagging and providing post views based on those tags
6. I want to support uploading media files (images, etc)
7. I want to be able to import this blog into it.

So I spent some time researching those issues and this is what I’ve come up with:

1. I will post via atom publishing -there are already blog tool that support this (Microsoft Live Writer, for example - I’m sure there are others).
2. I will provide atom feeds.
3. Rails has lots of caching examples.  I’ll start with file system based caching and move upwards from there.
4. I won’t provide full theme support but I’ll have a generic post format and include user defined stylesheets (and possible javascript).
5. acts_as_taggable until shown why not.
6. atompub can do this.
7. I think I can use atom feeds to do this.

Also …

As mentioned I’m hosting with SliceHost.com on a 256 slice so I need to keep it trim.  I may go to production on Sqlite3 (if I do the caching right this shouldn’t be a problem - and that would keep 4-10% of my limited RAM free).

Also my goal is to write as little new code as possible.  Plugins and gems whenever possible.

I figure it will take about a month to have something I can show to the world and not worry about hiding my face.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about what I learn that seems interesting.  And plenty that isn’t, I’m sure.

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