Blog

Introduction

After using jekyll for some time, I decided to create my own blog from scratch so I would understand what are the challenges and also be able to customize the way I want without searching for plugins or including workarounds.

First I thought this should be a private project, but maybe there are other people out there that wants to do the same and need some inspiration, so now this project is open source.

Here is the URL of my blog in production if you want to take a look: http://carolinesalib.com

Tech

• Ruby version: 3.0.0
• Rails version: 6.1.3

Usage

It should be as simple as:

bundle install
rails webpacker:install
rails server

How it works

About page

Simple page with some information about the writter.

Blog page

Storing and editing posts

With the intent of making it as simple as possible, I decided to not use a database for now. Instead, I'm saving the posts on markdown files under posts folder. This way I can easily edit my markdowns without needing a whole admin area where I can edit and preview my posts.

The post model (not an active record model) is responsible for converting the post.yml structure into a list of posts to be displayed at /blog/posts URL.

I'm using the redcarpet gem to parse the markdown files and rouge gem for code highlight.

Filters

In the /blog/posts URL, we can search for tags (ex: /blog/posts?tag=ruby) or for posts in progress (ex: /blog/posts?in_progress=true). posts in progress are hidden in the main list unless we use the in_progress param in the URL.

Slug

Slugs are really simple in this application.

• URL without slug: http://localhost:3000/blog/posts/1
• URL with slug: http://localhost:3002/blog/posts/1-how-to-debug-ruby-tasks-on-rubymine

The posts are saved with a numeric identification (ex: 1.md, 2.md) in the posts folder. The easiest way to implement a slug is to parameterize the title of the post, ex:

  blog_post_path("#{post.id}-#{post.title.parameterize}")

On the blog_controller.rb file I just need to convert the id param to int in order to get the id.

File.open("app/posts/#{params[:id].to_i}.md")

Contribution

If you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this project feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.