A New Home
My blog has been going through a state of flux lately. I hadn’t posted in a couple of months, and when I discovered posterous, I thought I had found the perfect system. Well, it didn’t make me post any more than I used to - it just made my blog look worse.
A few weeks ago I sat down with Michael Jackson (no, not that one). He showed off his new blog, written from scratch in one week, and I was instantly jealous. I’ve been using wordpress for more than a year, and although it’s a good system, I was always intimidated out of customizing it.
Well, a few weeks later (it took me longer), and hundreds of dollars of time poorer, here it is.
How does it work?
I’ve been dabbling with ruby for a year now, but haven’t had the chance to put anything into production. The site was created using Sinatra - an incredibly slick, performant ruby DSL. I used erb as the templating language, and Sequel as my ORM.
One of the coolest things about it, which I totally ripped off of Michael, is that all the posts are written as flat markdown files, rsynched to the server. Metadata for the posts is at the top of the file, and the files are converted to html only if they’ve changed. All it takes is one cap deploy. Here’s an example of what a post looks like
Title: A New Home
Tags: Ruby, Code, Site
My blog has been going through a state of flux lately. I hadn't posted in a couple
of months, and when I discovered [posterous](http://posterous.com), I thought...Ruby FTW
Back a few months ago, I was just starting to get sick of trying to learn rails. It had been nearly a year since I started, and I still didn’t get it. To top it off, I had been forced to use php for another project at work, and it felt so refreshing I swore I’d never go back.
I started to realize that there are other ruby frameworks out there, including Merb, Ramaze, and Sinatra (discovered in that order). Leaving rails behind was the best thing I ever did. I learned ruby. Ruby is awesome.
Design
I also designed the thing from scratch. The design was definitely inspired by many on The Best Designs. I used Blueprint, which made the css way easier. I took some icons from Dry Icons and the background image from Echo Enduring.
