My blog is full of bombs and or keys.

It has been a very entertaining and busy two weeks. In screencasts DHH shows us how easy it is to create a web log using the rails framework. In fact, it only takes 15 minutes.

If only.

Building my blog took a little bit longer than 15 minutes. Of course my needs are hard to fill and I knew very little about rails before I started. I wanted a lot: Security, Textile, Tags, Spam protection and a clean migration from my previous blog engine.

Migrating a win2k machine to Linux is an interesting and challenging experience. As of now, I have no access to my server cause I firewalled myself off the box using Shorewall.

I guess I should come clean and give some shout-outs to all the software that made this blog happen. (Excluding the obvious Ruby and Rails)

Development tools

• Aptana : I used Aptana to write this site, it is a very nice IDE based of eclipse with excellent ruby and rails support.

• Firefox web developer tool bar : Turns a one hour session debugging an odd CSS bug into a 10 second exercise.

• Firebug : If you do any web development, stop reading this and go download it now.

Ruby Gems

• Coderay : The best library I could find for syntax highlighting in Ruby.

• Redcloth : The default library for textile support. Somehow most of my previous posts ended up having very complicated html. I am determined not to have this happen again. In fact – my source of truth for all my posts is in textile.

• HTML5 : I use this to protect my site from evil cross site scripting.

Rails plug-ins

• Textile Editor Helper : The nice toolbar you see on top of the comments

• ror-akismet : This plug-in needed a bit of TLC to get it working. It gives me a spam protection courtesy of Akismet:“http://akismet.com/”.

Reference source code

• Typo : The current default rails blogging engine, it does it all. And more.

• Mephisto : A nice tight blogging engine.