Simple Rails Blogging With Vim & Markdown
I've had a wordpress blog for about 5 years. I've never really been serious about blogging, which is a real shame because I've learned so much about rails and web development over the years, there's tons I could have shared (plug for anyone to start blogging). Anyhow, over the last year or two, I've really wanted to get more into blogging and writing. There's so much potential that can come from it. Learning more about the topic you're writing about, communication skills, building an audience, marketing, SEO, building credibility, are just a few to start. I was recently listing to the ThoughtBot podcast and heard an interview with Nathan Berry where he discussed his goal of writing 1000 words everyday and also talked about building an audience. I was inspired and decided I had to get something started.
However, my geek side wanted something cool and convenient to write with. I'm a vim user, love markdown, and am loyal to git, so I knew I wanted to use those tools. My known options were pretty much limited to, Octopress, Jekyll, and Middleman. I'd tried Octopress and Jekyll before and didn't really get along with them (was also inexperienced with them) and I never really gave Middleman a chance. Before middleman came out, I was using and contributing to Serve a lot and I just didn't want to relearn Middleman. I just kept asking myself, "I'm a rails developer, why can't I use rails to blog?" I also had some notions to maybe add some functionalty for things like client login, intergrate my time tracker, invoicing, etc, and rails would have been my obvious choice for that.
Well, I finally came across a gem called postmarkdown. It's a "A simple Rails blog engine powered by Markdown". So I tried it out and I was hooked on making it work.
My website and blog are opensourced so I hope you'll check out out. I'll give the details on my blogging workflow below.
Fire up my terminal and to create a new post:
rails generate postmarkdown:post my-new-title
That generates a markdown file in app/posts. Then I open in vim and
like to use a vim plugin called Goyo for a write-room like
experience:
After finishing writing, it's just:
git commit ...
rake deploy
I could (and probably will) write a lot more about what's going on behind the scenes technically, but I mainly just wanted to give a brief overview on the setup and about a developer trying to make a habit of writing!
Until later, free to use the github repo to play around with.
Let me know if you have any questions.