PragDave‘s RubLog is a nice piece of software, but is missing advanced features, such as trackback and comments. On the other hand, it’s written in Ruby, so adding features is relatively easy.
Nevertheless, I’m quite new to this blogging thing, so I need some experience with more powerful software, just so that I can come to understand this area of the Web in more detail. Working at a company like Google, home of Blogger, you’d think that I’d know all about blogging, but I’m actually pretty ignorant. I spend most of my time configuring stuff and hacking code. I may know Apache well, for example, but as for what end-users do with it, I don’t pay much attention.
Anyway, I’m going to put my few previous entries on-line here and see how well this Movable Type thing works out. One nice thing about RubLog is its simplicity. Using nothing but plain text files, its operation is very transparent. Movable Type is quite a bit different, requiring lots of non-standard Perl modules and writing data away into DBM files. It also has a complex templating and tagging system, which is going to take me some time to get to grips with. For now, I’ll just stick with the defaults.
The only adventurous things I’m doing right now are:
using Markdown for mark-up
including some Ruby code in my templates between <% %> tags.
This then gets spat out into .rhtml files, on which Apache invokes eRuby at serving time.
I have to admire the flexibility of this publishing system.