Ruby Red Blogfruit Juice
Be forewarned: this may start to look like a Ruby blog for the next while.
Like a number of other captivated developers I’m shamelessly duplicating and rewriting things that already for the most part work just fine (ie, WordPress, the software that powers this weblog) simply because I never want to have to look at any web application code that isn’t Rails-based ever again. All redoubling of efforts aside, I fully intend to tap the resources of the other Rails-powered blog engines (ex Elite Journal, others) in true open source fashion. In kind I’ll make avialable whatever Lovecraftian monstrosity of a blog engine I summon from foul nether-realms, but I patently do not promise a) usability b) features of any sort c) language support of any sort (including English) d) packaging in an archival format that can be interpreted by anything other than a Ruby script I scrawled on some bathroom tissue in a drunken haze which manages to increase the size of whatever it’s archiving by 66.6% and also for some reason inserts anti-Welsh slurs instead of linebreaks in decoding process. I’m starting at least three SourceForge projects for the archiver alone.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that David had picked up my praise, but I didn’t mean to convey with yesterday’s post that my first exposure to Rails was via 43 Things. On the contrary, I jumped on Basecamp fairly early, all the while wondering what magicks powered such a superb web application. We got a fair bit of use out of Basecamp while I was at PICNet. 43 Things was simply a vehicle more relevant to my readers by which to mention my Rails obsession, is all.
My other source of Ruby inspiration comes from none other than Why The Lucky Stiff (aka just “Why”), whose Guide to Ruby is as much an exercise in extracting playful surrealism from the English language as it is a tutorial in the Ruby language. His sense of whimsy and understated genius is no less evident in RedHanded, for all intents the purposes the definitive Ruby blog right now. (Also, it’s not his Hobix fault that I’m not moving my blog to Hobix; it’s mine, and I’m sorry, and I’m a bad man who just has to write this sucka myself).
More will come. Should I add a category? I need to do some serious category refactoring in anticipation of moving to a new engine.