Robot Has No Heart

I just converted this blog from a dynamic Enki site to a static Jekyll one. I wanted to get rid of the comments, add SSL, and not have to upgrade Rails so often. I prefer composing locally also.

First, I exported all of the posts to lesstile templates using a rake task.

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task :export_posts => :environment do
  Post.find_each do |post|
    filename = "%s-%s.lesstile" % [
      post.published_at.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"),
      post.slug
    ]

    dir = "_posts"
    yaml_sep = "---"

    puts filename

    body = <<-EOS
#{yaml_sep}
layout: post
title:  #{post.title.inspect}
date:   #{post.published_at.strftime("%F %T %:z")}
tags:   #{post.tags.map {|x| x.name.downcase }.sort.inspect}
#{yaml_sep}
{% raw %}
#{post.body}
{% endraw %}
    EOS

    File.write(File.join(dir, filename), body)
  end
end

Lesstile is a wrapper around Textile that provides some extra functionality, so a custom converter is also needed. Put the following in _plugins/lesstile.rb (with associated additions to your Gemfile):

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require 'lesstile'
require 'coderay'
require 'RedCloth'

module Jekyll
  class LesstileConverter < Converter
    safe true
    priority :low

    def matches(ext)
      ext =~ /^\.lesstile$/i
    end

    def output_ext(ext)
      ".html"
    end

    def convert(content)
      Lesstile.format_as_xhtml(
        content,
        :text_formatter => lambda {|text|
          RedCloth.new(CGI::unescapeHTML(text)).to_html
        },
        :code_formatter => Lesstile::CodeRayFormatter
      )
    end
  end
end

The permalink configuration option needs to be set to match existing URLs, and to create the tag pages, use the jekyll-archives plugin.

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permalink: "/:year/:month/:day/:title/"

assets:
  digest: true

"jekyll-archives":
  enabled:
    - tags
  layout: 'tag'
  permalinks:
    tag: '/:name/'

gems:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-assets
  - jekyll-archives

For the archives page, use an empty archives.md in the root directory with a custom layout:

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{% include head.html %}
{% assign last_month = nil %}
<ul>
{% for post in site.posts %}
  {% assign current_month = post.date | date: '%B %Y' %}
  {% if current_month != last_month %}
    </ul>
    <h3>{{ current_month }}</h3>
    <ul>
  {% endif %}

  <li>
    <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>

    {% if post.tags != empty %}
    ({% for tag in post.tags %}<a href='/{{ tag }}'>{{ tag }}</a>{% if forloop.last %}{% else %}, {% endif %}{% endfor %})
    {% endif %}
  </li>

  {% assign last_month = current_month %}
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% include footer.html %}

For a full example, including a recommended set of layouts and includes, see the new sources for this site.

I’ve just finished up a fairly major over haul of the Enki admin area, finally throwing away the ugly SimpleLog stylings. Features include:

1. New visual style, heavily inspired by the new Habari Monolith look
2. New dashboard, with space to add your own data (feedburner subscribers? analytics data?)
3. Nicer forms (thanks formtastic!)
4. AJAX goodness for UI snappiness
5. Undo for item deletion (no more alert boxes!)

Screens:

Of course there’s still more I’d like to add (in particular to do with tags), but isn’t that always the case? I think it’s pretty swish – if you’ve already got an install just pull from master, if you think you might like an install, head over to the Enki website.

Finally got this blog switched over to Enki. Main feed has moved to feed burner. Please report any weirdness to the relevant authorities.

For some extra content, here’s what’s happening in the Enki world:

• Moved to github (keeping gitorious as a mirror)
• Tim has a functional multiple authors fork
• API is functional if you want to kick the tyres a bit, still needs some work though. Here is some code to publish from VIM

I’m going on holidays until the end of January. The off line kind of holiday where I don’t see a computer. So sad.

So here is a tasty treat for you to devour until I return. A sneak preview of a Fashionable New Blogging App™ named Enki. It is an alternative to Mephisto and SimpleLog that is built on the principles espoused in my prior writings. The website is built using Enki itself, and the port of this site from mephisto is just about finished, so you know you’re getting code that’s got a real life application. There’s still a few rough edges, but it’s ready enough to start building something with if you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty. I’ve set up a mailing list for it which I’ll be catching up on once I get back.

Or why I’m writing another blog engine for ruby

I’ve been running this site on Mephisto for a number of months now. It is fantastic at what it does, but I’ve just recently realised it’s not what I want.

I want to configure my blog by hacking code

I don’t want preferences or theme support – I want to edit code. Mephisto isn’t great for this – it uses non standard routing (everything goes through dispatch), it uses liquid templates. I feel like I have to learn Mephisto to hack it.
SimpleLog is another rails option, but it sucks because it reads like a PHP app, and I don’t want to be hacking that. It’s built to be configured, not to be hacked.

So here is my grand plan.

An opinionated blog engine that does things my way. OpenID login, XHTML valid default template, RESTful stuff, code highlighting in comments, etc…
To install, you branch my master git repo and customize away. You can just keep rebasing to get all the trunk updates. You can publish a ‘theme’ in the form of a patch against trunk. The code is going to be lean since I don’t need to accommodate for 5, 10 or 15 articles per page, so it will be easy to comprehend.

Basically, it’s so you can write your own blog without having to worry about boring stuff like admin, defensio integration, and OpenID auth.

I wonder what I’ll call it.

UPDATE: Look I made it – Enki