Ruby blog software.

[Lloyd Zusman]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

I'm looking for the typical things: reliability, features, ease of use,
etc.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions that you might have.

 

[gabriele renzi]

Lloyd Zusman ha scritto:

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

I'm looking for the typical things: reliability, features, ease of use,
etc.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions that you might have.

I guess the biggest players in this arena are Rublog and tDiary.
the former I saw used from many rubyists, the latter has enpowers a big
community (tdiary.net) in japan (english docs in the doc/ dir of the
tarball pkg)

 

[Jamis Buck]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

Then again, please don't. I'm interested in what people have to say
about Ruby blogs, too. I'm using moveabletype right now, and although
there are things I like about it, there are lots of things I *don't*
like about it.

I'm looking for the typical things: reliability, features, ease of use,
etc.

Ditto.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions that you might have.

- Jamis

--
Jamis Buck
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."

 

[Austin Ziegler]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

I'm looking for the typical things: reliability, features, ease of use,
etc.

I just switched (in the last two days) from tDiary to RubLog. tDiary
is decent, but doesn't have nice English support, and there is little
that seems that can be done to support preventing comment spam.

RubLog doesn't have any comment facilities at all, so ... The bigger
problem with RubLog is that it doesn't have a web-based input
interface, but that may change with the Ruwiki integration converter
that is being worked on. This could also be used to provide a comment
mechanism, but that would take additional work.

-austin

 

[Hal Fulton]

Then again, please don't. I'm interested in what people have to say
about Ruby blogs, too. I'm using moveabletype right now, and although
there are things I like about it, there are lots of things I *don't*
like about it.

Aren't we all.

I only have experience with Rublog really, but I'll share my impressions
of it here.

I don't have a public blog at the moment, by the way, or I'd point you
to it.

There were some minor problems setting up rublog, two-thirds of which
were my own dumb mistakes.

Once I set it up, I had some conceptual problems with it. I was looking
at the .rb file, and I asked Chad: Couldn't this be put in a config file
or something instead?

And he said: The code IS the config file.

And this bothered me at first, but then the light bulb went on. Rublog
gives you a truly rich and powerful set of tools, and lets you use them
more or less as you wish.

The more simple and trivial your blog is, the more you night say: It should
do this for me. I shouldn't have to write this.

But as it scales up, it scales smoothly and easily, and it's all in Ruby,
and life is good. And then you realize: Hey, I bet I could do THIS and it
wouldn't be that hard at all...

Just my impressions.


Hal

 

[Chris Morris]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

I'm looking for the typical things: reliability, features, ease of use,
etc.

My own clWiki has a blog interface for it. I use it here:
http://www.clabs.org/blog. That said, to my knowledge it's not used much
anywhere else, so there might be lurking evil for someone else trying to
use it. For searching, it requires a DRb index process to be run
(technically it doesn't, but the non-DRb is broken right now).

You can leave the wiki freely editable, or configure it to have the
editor be secured, so only certain people can edit.

As Wikis go, it's also bizarre, missing some very common features and
including some that most popular ones don't have.

So ... to sum up, it works for me, it might even work for you.

 

[Ara.T.Howard]

Then again, please don't. I'm interested in what people have to say about
Ruby blogs, too. I'm using moveabletype right now, and although there are
things I like about it, there are lots of things I *don't* like about it.

same here on both counts.

i wonder if tdairy would run under webrick? anyone out there done it?


-a
--
===============================================================================
| EMAIL :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| PHONE :: 303.497.6469
| A flower falls, even though we love it;
| and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
| --Dogen
===============================================================================

 

[James Britt]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

I'm looking for the typical things: reliability, features, ease of use,
etc.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions that you might have.

Blogtari is all Ruby, supports textile, markdown, and (to some extent)
OOo writer docs as source format, exports rss feeds, and has a modest
XML-RPC interface.

It's beta; development has been put aside for a bit while other projects
have my attention, but it runs rubyxml.com, ruby-doc.org,
jamesbritt.com, among others.


http://www.blogtari.com


James

 

[Chris Morris]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

I don't want to get into a "my blog is better than yours" war on this
list, so it probably would be best if any of you who have thoughts
about this would email me privately.

Does Instiki have a blog view? It's been pretty well received, I believe.

http://www.instiki.org/show/InstikiFeatures

Hmmm ... rss feed, maybe could be used effectively for a blog.

Oh, minor deal on using my clWiki for a blog, you can setup a custom tag
to determine which articles you'd like to publish in the blog view
(defaults to all...)

 

[Lloyd Zusman]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

[ ... ]

Wow! I'm happily surprised at how many of you have responded. There
are too many replies for me to thank you individually, so I give my
heartfelt thanks collectively to you all.

I now have a number of promising Ruby blog options to try. Once I have
settled on one of them, I'll write back with my experiences and
feedback.

Again ... thanks!

 

[Will Drewry]

As a favor to a friend, I'm setting up a blog for her on my server.

Since I like ruby so much, I'd like to use some ruby-based blog
software. I see a number of possibilities on RAA for this, and I'm
wondering if any of you could recommend one or more of these (or perhaps
something else that's ruby-ish that's not on RAA, if such a thing
exists).

[ ... ]

Wow! I'm happily surprised at how many of you have responded. There
are too many replies for me to thank you individually, so I give my
heartfelt thanks collectively to you all.

I now have a number of promising Ruby blog options to try. Once I have
settled on one of them, I'll write back with my experiences and
feedback.

Again ... thanks!

Just to add to the list of example sites, dataspill.org is rublog-based.

Good luck. I know I'm not alone in looking forward to hearing about
your experiences!
wad

 

[Laurent Sansonetti]

Hi,

tDiary is decent, but doesn't have nice English support

Send patch.

and there is little that seems that can be done to support preventing comment spam.

RubLog doesn't have any comment facilities at all, so ...

You can disable tsukkomi in the preferences.

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Hi,
Send patch.

If one likes mucking around in the tDiary code. I didn't. I found the
plugins easier to deal with, but too many of them are just *slightly*
problematic. The real issue with tDiary's English support is the level
of documentation available. It's unclear what modes and plugins work
well together.

You can disable tsukkomi in the preferences.

Not exactly preferred. I *do* want a comment and visitor tracking
system without resorting to email (as I am having to do with RubLog),
but I don't want to have to delete spam comments and tracking from my
diary, either.

-austin

 

[Laurent Sansonetti]

If one likes mucking around in the tDiary code. I didn't. I found the
plugins easier to deal with, but too many of them are just *slightly*
problematic. The real issue with tDiary's English support is the level
of documentation available. It's unclear what modes and plugins work
well together.

I agree with you on that point, non-japanese documentation is lacking.
But, fortunately, it is written in Ruby, so reading the code is
usually enough to understand what it does

Not exactly preferred. I *do* want a comment and visitor tracking
system without resorting to email (as I am having to do with RubLog),
but I don't want to have to delete spam comments and tracking from my
diary, either.

Hehe, I don't know tDiary so much, but maybe it is possible to write a
plugin that uses an antispam filter for that. But I'm using tDiary
since more than a year now (with a decent traffic), and I never had a
single spam comment.

 

[Mike Clark]

Then again, please don't. I'm interested in what people have to say
about Ruby blogs, too. I'm using moveabletype right now, and although
there are things I like about it, there are lots of things I *don't*
like about it.

Just for the record, you can use MoveableType styles with Rublog. For
example, I'm using a variant of the ModernLines style on my site:

http://pragmaticautomation.com

Jim Weirich has more example styles with Rublog at:

http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/General/MoreLooks.rdoc

Mike

 

[Jamis Buck]

Just for the record, you can use MoveableType styles with Rublog. For
example, I'm using a variant of the ModernLines style on my site:

http://pragmaticautomation.com

Jim Weirich has more example styles with Rublog at:

http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/General/MoreLooks.rdoc

Mike

Rublog looks tempting, I'll have to admit. I need to give it a try (and
Blogtari -- that looked promising, too).

However, here are three of the features that I really would like, and
which I didn't see in either of those:

1) Online composition of articles.

2) The ability to set an article as a "draft", so it doesn't appear
in the published version of the blog. (My wife uses this feature of
MoveableType all the time.) This feature only really makes sense when
online composotion of articles is available.

3) Textile support. (Blogtari does this, but I didn't see any
RedCloth converter for Rublog.)

I imagine it's not too hard to add new converters to Rublog. (I seem to
remember a thread about that not too very long ago...) If I have the
time (ha!) I'd like to see about maybe hacking on the other two
features, unless someone has already done so.

- Jamis

--
Jamis Buck
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Mike Clark wrote:
Rublog looks tempting, I'll have to admit. I need to give it a try (and
Blogtari -- that looked promising, too).

However, here are three of the features that I really would like, and
which I didn't see in either of those:

1) Online composition of articles.

As noted in an earlier message, Chad has a RubLog/Ruwiki converter for
an earlier version of Ruwiki -- it doesn't work with the current
version. Either he or I will get it working before RubyConf 2004, as
it's part of my goal for the 0.8.1/0.9.0 timeframe.

2) The ability to set an article as a "draft", so it doesn't appear
in the published version of the blog. (My wife uses this feature of
MoveableType all the time.) This feature only really makes sense when
online composotion of articles is available.

There is a (commented-out) feature called Filters that will help with
this. I am diving into the Rublog code as the Bluecloth/Markdown
support didn't work for short RSS, so I added the ability to put a
synopsis as was done for RDoc formats. I really like the multiple
format support, and this was nice and easy to deal with. I also added
a custom timestamp generator from the filename (e.g., Foo.20040101.md
will publish the markdown-formatted with the date of 2004.01.01). I
will probably look at enabling the Filters feature on my local copy
and offer the changes back to Dave.

I also took the template enhancements that I did for Ruwiki (it uses
the RDoc/Rublog template engine) and backported them to Ruwiki
(although there's porting that has to go both ways) that I will offer
back to Dave for this, as I think it simplifies some of the template
code.

3) Textile support. (Blogtari does this, but I didn't see any
RedCloth converter for Rublog.)

I imagine it's not too hard to add new converters to Rublog. (I seem to
remember a thread about that not too very long ago...) If I have the
time (ha!) I'd like to see about maybe hacking on the other two
features, unless someone has already done so.

Ultimately, Ruwiki will offer a way to work with Textile and Markdown
formatted stuff.

-austin

 

[Dave Thomas]

1) Online composition of articles.

You probably won't see this coming from me: I'd much rather use a text
editor to edit text...

2) The ability to set an article as a "draft", so it doesn't appear
in the published version of the blog. (My wife uses this feature of
MoveableType all the time.) This feature only really makes sense when
online composotion of articles is available.

One of the joys (for me) of RubLog is that it understands CVS, so I can
edit articles anywhere, and then jut check them in to have them appear.
I run Apache on my Powerbiik, with a RubLog pointing to my check-ed out
workspace. I edit articles on that machine, and view them inthe local
apache. When I'm happy, I do CVS commit, and they're sent to my server,
and are published via http://pragprog.com/pragdave.

3) Textile support. (Blogtari does this, but I didn't see any
RedCloth converter for Rublog.)

There's already a Markdown convertor--that's BlueCloth, right?


Cheers

Dave

 

[Dave Thomas]

--Apple-Mail-10--132287805
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
format=flowed

One of the joys (for me) of RubLog is that it understands CVS, so I
can edit articles anywhere, and then jut check them in to have them
appear. I run Apache on my Powerbiik, with a RubLog pointing to my
check-ed out workspace. I edit articles on that machine, and view them
inthe local apache. When I'm happy, I do CVS commit, and they're sent
to my server, and are published via http://pragprog.com/pragdave.

Time to start actually reading my posts before hitting SEND...

3) Textile support. (Blogtari does this, but I didn't see any
RedCloth converter for Rublog.)

There's already a Markdown convertor--that's BlueCloth, right?

What I meant to add after this was "So I imagine adding other like
formats can't be too difficult..."

Cheers

Dave

--Apple-Mail-10--132287805--

 

[Jamis Buck]

Well, if I had shell access to the box on which my blog is published,
your CVS approach would be wonderful. Unfortunately, all I have is
FTP... But wait a minute; am I a Ruby programmer, or aren't I? I'm
sure I could make it work, for me. My wife, however, would certainly
prefer the web interface to a
text-editor/local-web-server/upload-process approach. It would certainly
make Rublog that much more attractive to the
"non-programming-casual-blogger" demographic.

Time to start actually reading my posts before hitting SEND...

What I meant to add after this was "So I imagine adding other like
formats can't be too difficult..."

I figured that's what you meant.

- Jamis

--
Jamis Buck
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."