I've been thinking that what Staticmatic needs to drive it's popularity is to be a turnkey blogging platform out of the box (or in as few steps as possible.) I'm all in favor of using free services that people have already made so here's my plan:
-Posts
Staticmatic already has good support for posts, because posts are just websites. To make posts you just write content and have it rendered by Staticmatic. Easy enough.
-Comments
A good embeddable comment site is Disqus (www.disqus.com), it does nearly everything I could want in a comment engine.
-RSS (the hard part)
I haven't found a good service for building RSS feeds from a website yet. If anyone knows a good service I'd like to use it to save work. My plan right now is to integrate RSS generating functionality directly into Staticmatic.
To make a directory have RSS support, you would put an atom.xml.haml file in the directory you want to enable support for. Then inside that file there would be ruby expressions that 1. build a list of files and publication dates and 2. takes this list and outputs an RSS feed in Atom format. If the publication date is left out, we'd use the file modification time.
This RSS code would also include some code for generating an archives page.
I'd want to make this as easy as possible to use, so that might involve some custom rake tasks for writing new posts. Any suggestions about how to make this simpler would be welcome.
Also, please let me know if you think there are some fundamentals to blogs that I haven't addressed.
On Jun 30, 2008, at 10:14 PM, Ryan Mulligan wrote:
> -RSS (the hard part)
> I haven't found a good service for building RSS feeds from a website > yet. If anyone knows a good service I'd like to use it to save work. > My plan right now is to integrate RSS generating functionality > directly into Staticmatic.
One possbility here would be to generate HTML on the blog index page that include hAtom microformat markup. Then, subtlety <http://subtlety.errtheblog.com/ > can do the hAtom -> Atom conversion.
You probably wouldn't want to use the simplistic code I wrote, but the site for alexandria.rubyforge.org uses a "blog", which I described a while back:
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Ryan Mulligan <r...@ryantm.com> wrote: > I've been thinking that what Staticmatic needs to drive it's popularity is > to be a turnkey blogging platform out of the box (or in as few steps as > possible.) I'm all in favor of using free services that people have already > made so here's my plan:
> -Posts
> Staticmatic already has good support for posts, because posts are just > websites. To make posts you just write content and have it rendered by > Staticmatic. Easy enough.
> -Comments
> A good embeddable comment site is Disqus (www.disqus.com), it does nearly > everything I could want in a comment engine.
> -RSS (the hard part)
> I haven't found a good service for building RSS feeds from a website yet. > If anyone knows a good service I'd like to use it to save work. My plan > right now is to integrate RSS generating functionality directly into > Staticmatic.
> To make a directory have RSS support, you would put an atom.xml.haml file > in the directory you want to enable support for. Then inside that file there > would be ruby expressions that 1. build a list of files and publication > dates and 2. takes this list and outputs an RSS feed in Atom format. If the > publication date is left out, we'd use the file modification time.
> This RSS code would also include some code for generating an archives page.
> I'd want to make this as easy as possible to use, so that might involve > some custom rake tasks for writing new posts. Any suggestions about how to > make this simpler would be welcome.
> Also, please let me know if you think there are some fundamentals to blogs > that I haven't addressed.
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 9:42 PM, Joseph Method <tris...@gmail.com> wrote: > You probably wouldn't want to use the simplistic code I wrote, but the site > for alexandria.rubyforge.org uses a "blog", which I described a while > back:
I realize that I didn't put any permalinks in the front display. I mean it works fine, as long as you keep to that very specific format. It constrains the front page view to the 3 most recent entries. What I would do for a "turn-key blogging platform" is make a rake-style task that adds/edits/deletes/etc. the entries. Add and edit would open an editor with the body text (it would also be possible to specify a file) but on save the body text would go into a yaml file. Another command would edit the attributes, like date. The default location would be blog/, but other blogs could be created and specified.
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Ryan Mulligan <r...@ryantm.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 9:42 PM, Joseph Method <tris...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You probably wouldn't want to use the simplistic code I wrote, but the >> site for alexandria.rubyforge.org uses a "blog", which I described a >> while back:
> I haven't found a good service for building RSS feeds from a website yet. If
> anyone knows a good service I'd like to use it to save work. My plan right
> now is to integrate RSS generating functionality directly into Staticmatic.
> To make a directory have RSS support, you would put an atom.xml.haml file in
> the directory you want to enable support for. Then inside that file there
> would be ruby expressions that 1. build a list of files and publication
> dates and 2. takes this list and outputs an RSS feed in Atom format. If the
> publication date is left out, we'd use the file modification time.
> This RSS code would also include some code for generating an archives page.
> I'd want to make this as easy as possible to use, so that might involve some
> custom rake tasks for writing new posts. Any suggestions about how to make
> this simpler would be welcome.
> Also, please let me know if you think there are some fundamentals to blogs
> that I haven't addressed.
> Ryan Mulligan
You might want to take a look at Webby (http://webby.rubyforge.org).
That generates an Atom feed via a Rake task and seems to work well.
