README

RubySlippers, the smartest blogging engine in all of Oz!

Introduction

To set up a new blog

$ git clone git://github.com/dreamr/ruby-slippers.git myblog
$ cd myblog
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle
$ rake install
$ -> Blog name: My new blog
$ Installing your blog to my-new-blog
$ Blog installed!

To create an article

$ rake new
$ -> Title: My new blog post!
$ Creating and opening my-new-blog-post (opens in your text editor!)
$ rake publish (commits, pushes, publishes then opens in your browser!)

Philosophy

RubySlippers is based on Toto and aims to achieve their goals as well as our own. Hosting a ruby based free blog shouldn't be hard. We want to take that a step further and say it should be easy. Easy as pie. Easy as my best friend's Mom. Easy as a 1 click installer.

Oh yeah, MRI, bytecode whatever. If it is Ruby, it should run.

How it works

Article management is done with a text editor and git
- stored as .txt files, with embeded metadata (in yaml format).
- processed through a markdown converter (rdiscount) by default.
- can have tags
- can have images
- can be browsed by date, or tags
- comments are handled by disqus
built for easy use with ERB.
built right on top of Rack.
built to take advantage of HTTP caching.
built with heroku in mind.

RubySlippers comes with a basic default theme for you to mangle. I hope to release more themes shortly and will accept your submitted themes.

Deployment

On heroku

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'updated blog'
$ git push heroku

On your own server or locally

Once you have created the remote git repo, and pushed your changes to it, you can run RubySlippers with any Rack compliant web server, such as thin, mongrel or unicorn.

I like to use shotgun as it reloads while I work

$ cd myblog
$ bundle
$ shotgun

With thin, you would do something like:

$ thin start -R config.ru

With unicorn, you can just do:

$ unicorn

Configuration

You can configure ruby-slippers, by modifying the config.ru file. For example, if you want to set the blog author to 'John Galt', you could add set :author, 'John Galt' inside the RubySlippers::Engine::App.new block. Here are the defaults, to get you started:

#
# Add your settings here
# set [:setting], [value]
# 
set :author,      "Dreamr"                              # blog author
set :title,       "RubySlippers, the smartest blog engine in all of Oz!"  # site title
# set :root,      "index"                                   # page to load on /
set :date,        lambda {|now| now.strftime("%m/%d/%Y") }    # date format for articles
# set :markdown,  :smart                                    # use markdown + smart-mode
# set :disqus,    false                                     # disqus id, or false
set :summary,     :max => 300, :delim => /~/                # length of article summary and delimiter
# set :ext,       'txt'                                     # file extension for articles
# set :cache,      28800                                    # cache duration, in seconds
set :tag_separator, ', '                                    # tag separator for articles
set :date, lambda {|now| now.strftime("%B #{now.day.ordinal} %Y") }
# set this to your local port. I use shotgun, so 9393.
set :url, "http://localhost:9393" if ENV['RACK_ENV'] == 'development'

# to use haml, add the gem to your Gemfile and bundle, then uncomment this
# and redo your templates using haml and renamed to html.haml
# set :to_html, lambda { |path, page, binding| 
#   Haml::Engine.new(File.read("#{path}/#{page}.html.haml"),
#   :attr_wrapper => '"',
#   :filename => path ).render(binding)
# }

Thanks

To heroku for making this easy as pie.
To the developers of Toto, for making such an awesome minimal blog engine in Ruby.