When I first started blogging I used Wordpress, while it was nice at that time, it felt rather cumbersome to use for posting technical stuff like code samples. Also having everything in the database make it difficult to use my favorite text editor to manage my content. So I decided to move to Webby : it allows you to use the power of ruby erb inside you html pages without the overkill of running a rails Another advantage is that it creates static html so it’s both fast and secure.
I’ve been running it now for more then a year and have been happy ever since. This blogpost shares some of my scripts/enhancements I’ve used:
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Wordpress exporter to Webby : this was my first challenge, how do I get everything from my wordpress out of that database. I wrote a little script that reads from the RSS feed of the wordpress and export everything into webby structure . It’s not the most robust script (it was early stages ruby for me at that time), but you’ll get the idea.
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RSS feed in Webby: I didn’t find any good rss feed code, most of it didn’t pass the rss validation. So here you can find my take on it. As a bonus the script tries to make your images absolute, which is important for having your images displayed in some rss feedreaders.
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Highlighting with Coderay : webby includes a way to highlight parts of the code. This works very well, but I found myself missing a way to include a file instead of pasting the code directly into the blogpost. This has many advantages: I can edit the file separate and the correct syntax highlighting in my favorite text editor still works. And the escaping works better for ruby code as there can not be a problem with escaping special characters. After a while I switched to Ultraviolet because it has way more syntaxes supported. The downside is that it requires the onigurama library . This isn’t really a problem on Mac using Macports.
patricks-iMac:jedi-webby patrick$ sudo port install oniguruma4
patricks-iMac:jedi-webby patrick$ gem install ultraviolet -- -I/opt/local/lib
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing ultraviolet:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb -I/opt/local/lib
checking for main() in -lonig... no
creating Makefile
make
gcc -I. -I. -I/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin10.0 -I. -D_XOPEN_SOURCE -D_DARWIN_C_SOURCE -fno-common -Wall -c oregexp.c
oregexp.c:2:23: error: oniguruma.h: No such file or directory
#Solution
patricks-iMac:jedi-webby patrick$ gem install ultraviolet -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local
This is all for now.
Codify helper (with Ultraviolet): put inside your webby-root/lib
Codify helper (with Coderay): put inside your webby-root/lib
Rss feed file
Wordpress to webby conversion script