Released Ore 0.9.1. Contains minor stylistic improvements to the templates. You don't have to use Bundler to create a new RubyGem.

$ gem install ore
$ mine my_project

Just pushed a pre-release of multi_markdown, feedback welcomed.

$ gem install multi_markdown --pre

require 'multi_markdown'
MultiMarkdown.new('hello _world_').to_html
# => "<p>hello <em>world</em></p>\n"


multi_markdown allows projects to use a wide variety of Markdown libraries, without having to depend on a specific one. AKA multi_json for markdown. Please stop explicitly depending on rdiscount or redcarpet, try multi_markdown instead.

Released Ore 0.9.0. Ore is a flexible RubyGem project generator, supporting Git/Hg/SVN, gemspecs, gemspec.yml, rubygems-tasks, bundler, .rvmrc, RDoc, Markdown, Textile, YARD, RSpec, Test::Unit and installable templates.

$ gem install ore
$ mine my-project --rspec --yard --markdown

rubygems-tasks are agnostic and unobtrusive Rake tasks for building, installing and releasing Ruby Gems. rubygems-tasks are compatible with plain .gemspec files, support Git/Mercurial/SVN, PGP signed tags, package checksums, PGP signed packages, a console task and ANSI coloured output!

require 'rubygems/tasks'
Gem::Tasks.new

Just released Hexdump 0.2.1. Blog post discusses the new features and performance improvements.

Do you manually git tag your releases? Do you follow Semantic Versioning? Do you prefix your version tags with a v? You don't?!

Learn why Semantic Version Tags are a good idea and how it helps automated tools.

net-http-server is a pure-Ruby, small, Rack-like and Rack-compliant HTTP Server, meant to be a simpler alternative to WEBrick. Blog post gives a walk through of just how simple net-http-server is.

DeploYML is a simple deployment solution for Ruby / Rails projects that uses a single YAML file, Git and ssh. Read more

The recent discussion about minimal gemspecs inspired me to create Ore, a simple solution for generating and building RubyGems, that uses a single YAML file to describe a project. Source.

static_paths is a library to manage the paths of directories containing static-content within multiple libraries. static_paths makes it simple to register, unregister and search through directories containing static-content needed by your libraries. Get the code.

YARD can easily be extended to recognize and document new meta-programming methods. yard-dm is a new YARD plugin gem, which adds support for documenting the properties/relations of DataMapper models. More on this.

Introducing the new Web Spider Obstacle Course (WSOC). WSOC was completely re-written as a Sinatra app, and can easily be used to test the robustness of any Web Spider/Crawler/Scanner. Currently, Spidr uses WSOC as part of it's test suite.

I like to create Ruby projects, and I also like to use Hoe to manage them. With any Ruby project generator, I always hate having to add my usual boilerplate code and Rake tasks. Luckily, Hoe supports using project templates, stored in ~/.hoe_template, with the sow command. For example, here is the Hoe template I use to generate new projects, with RSpec 1.2.9 and YARD 0.5.2 setup.

Install: git clone git://github.com/postmodern/hoe_template.git ~/.hoe_template
Use: sow my_project

Introducing Sketches, a live-programming gem that can spawn editors, watch your edited files and reload them when they change. Sketches is easy to configure and fits right in your .irbrc file.

After hearing lots of people asking howto install Ruby 1.9.1 alongside 1.8, I decided to write this really simple shell script to get the ball rolling. It's hosted as a gist, so feel free to fork and improve upon it.

Hey, ever wanted to load Objects from Ruby files without having to use YAML or define a custom class named like the file? Now you can, with Contextify.