thedailychannel.com — rubyjournal

What is rubyjournal?

Rubyjournal is free software you can use to create and maintain a weblog on your website. If you wish, you can download it and install on your own computer right now. (go to download page now)

Rubyjournal is written in ruby, an open source programming language available for free on the internet. rubyjournal is open source, too

It's designed to let you, an individual, engage in the happy practice of single-source multi-channel publishing. Forget I said that. It's to let you create multiple blogs on a single server, but manage it from your desktop.

What's required?

You need the Ruby language on your computer. If you're running Mac OS/X 10.2, you're in luck -- Ruby is already installed!

You need FTP access to the server you use to host your website.

That means you need to know the URL, the username, and the password.

What's involved in creating my weblog or 'blog'?

When you make an entry, you create a file that looks like this:

blog=fascination
title=I've always loved garlic recipes
date=oct 31 2002 

description=The best garlic recipe I ever had was 
Broccoli and Garlic. and I cooked it up 
completely impromptu! 
Here's how it happened...

body=First I put olive oil into the pan and 
turn on the heat. For frozen broccoli I usually 
zap it in the microwave for 3 minutes. When I
chopped up the garlic and put it in the pan
to saute, the funniest thing happened. Uncle
Boris made himself very scarce right away!
author=Heather Penworthy Grubb

This file will become your weblog posting. You save the file, perhaps calling it 'bestgarlic.dat', on your computer in the folder that is the source of your weblogs (yes, you can have more than one!). Then you run two programs, one to prepare the files on your local computer, and one to publish them to your website.

What do the rubyjournal programs do?

The first program does almost all the work. It

• sorts your journal entries by date
• creates a 'permalink' from each entry to an archive of entries organized by journal and by month.
• copies your entries to that archive, archived by month and year
• generates an RSS feed for your weblog, that people or automated aggregation services can use to subscribe to it.
• If your 'blog=myweblogname' is a new weblog, a new folder is created for it, both on your computer, and on your remote server.

You run it like this, in a terminal window:

ruby draft.rb

The second program copies the html file, the permalink archive files, and the rss.xml syndication feed file over to your website. It's called 'publish.rb', and you run it like this:

ruby publish.rb

How do I download and configure rubyjournal?

You can download it right here click here for the download page

To configure it, you need to edit the entries in 'sitemanager.rb' to reflect your ftp site parameters.

@site="www.yourwebsitename.com"
@folder="www/journals"
@folderbase="journals"
@username="yourloginname"
@password="yoursecret$qn@5password"

After I configure it, do I have to do any work?

Well of course, what did you expect? After all, it's free, right? You have to

• write your postings, filling out the blog=, title=, date=, description= and body= information as described above
• save your file in your locals 'journals' folder with a memorable name, like bestgarlic.dat
• run 'ruby draft.rb' and look at the resulting 'index.html' in your journals folder.
• run 'ruby publish.rb' to copy the files up to your website.
• did we mention this is free?
• run 'ruby notify.rb' to tell a couple of weblog directories that your weblog has changed.

Books on Ruby

Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt
On-line version of Programming Rubyby Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt

Other Ruby Resources

Ruby at ruby-lang.org

Ruby Windows installer at sourceforge.net