Sinatra: Up and Running

Chapter 5. Hands On: Your Own Blog Engine

Like so many others, most open source developers run their own public blog. But there is a huge difference between open source developers and other people: while most “normal” people have to decide what kind of blogging software to use, developers tend to decide what kind of blogging software to implement. The reason for this? A blogging software is actually extremely simple to implement if you just want to have a single, simple workflow for blogging. This makes custom blogging software (the blog engine) way more appealing. And doesn’t it seem like a small and fun project?

Let’s build on what we’ve learned in the recent chapters about modular applications and Rack to build our own little blog engine.

Workflow Concept

As programmers, we can get quite passionate about what text editor or IDE to use for writing code. Why should we be less opinionated when it comes to writing blog posts? In-browser editors have become quite impressive as of late. But embedding those in a blog engine just for getting syntax highlighting? Instead, let’s avoid dealing with authorization and the security issues involved with implementing an in-browser editor and having to set it up properly by simply not doing it at all.

What if we could use our favorite editor to write blog posts and use git to keep track of versioning? This would, among other things, give us all the features Git comes with: tracking changes made to the posts, creating different branches for working ...