I did it my way#

Sun, 01 May 2011 11:50:35 +0000

tweet. telent_net 63709899460321280 short unoriginal observation on ruby blogging engines: quicker to write your own than evaluate all the other poorly documented ones

tweet. telent_net 63710033904549888 ... this observation only holds if you skimp on the documentation of course. which is where we came in

If you can see this, you can see my blog design all changed again. This time it's a Ruby Sinatra application (whence the name my-way running on thin-prefork which keeps the article texts in git and uses RedCloth plus some ugly regexps to turn them into HTML. The Markdown vs Textile decision is not an especially interesting one in the first place, but gets a lot easier still when you have something like 9 years worth of previous articles in Textile format.

Publishing is achieved by pushing to a git repository on the live machine (a Bytemark vm). A post-update hook in the remote repository is responsible for checking out the updated commit (git doesn't like pushing to non-bare repositories) and sending SIGHUP to the running instance of my-way which causes it to reindex files.

1. !/bin/sh GITWORKTREE=/home/dan/src/git/my-way git checkout -f kill -1 `cat /tmp/my-way.pid`

The version of my-way on github lags the actual version slightly, because I need to separate the engine from the articles and from the config data (there are things like adsense subscriber id, flickr api keys, etc) before I push the latter to a public service. Will clean it up in the next few days.

And my apologies to RSS feed subscribers. I've finally dropped the /diary prefix on the URL for this blog, and the old RSS feed didn't use GUIDs and I'm too lazy to make the new one do so either, so the upshot is you just got the ten most recent articles in your feed again. Sorry.